Phooey.
It didn't play out that way, for sure.
High school has been on my mind of late. You see, my senior class is celebrating a big number this year for a reunion. There are celebrations set for the same September weekend as the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Bad planning, indeed. But you can feel the excitement and the fervor already on social media. Zoom planning sessions have been conducted. Folks are already discussing a postponement in the event not everybody gets vaccinated.
It certainly is all the rage.
At one point last week, the Mount Vernon, New York pages on Facebook were filled with posts of memories. And everybody seemed to be posting class photos from elementary school and up.
I watched this all unfold and I had several knee jerk reactions. One very much tied to the city of Mount Vernon itself.
I looked at all the third grade class snapshots and it was very easy to see the problem my hometown had then. The school photos from the predominantly Black neighborhoods on the south side of town displays a sort of integration that model city planners would have envied. I mean, in my own third grade class photo, out of a total of 25 kids, there were six....count 'em...six White children. We were the trailblazers. We knew how to all get along way before anybody else did.
The junior high school class photos from the south side showed a little bit more of a mix, but we were still sporting diversity in a very big way. As a matter of fact, a few of us from those years have been regularly meeting on Zoom. We got along then. We get along now.
Now, in Mount Vernon, the commuter rail tracks cut right through the center of town and essentially created a sort of wall that Donald Trump would have been proud of. The quintessential racial divide.
So, as I am surveying the elementary schools being posted on Facebook by kids on the north side of town, I was astounded. Maybe I shouldn't have been. But there it was in black and white. Well, totally white. There were virtually no children of color in any of these class photos. And you could also tell that things were just a little bit more upscale on that side of the tracks.
It made me swell with pride again how much I enjoyed my elementary and junior high school friends, regardless of the amount of money in their family's bank accounts and...oh yeah...their skin pigmentation. And, in turn, it reminded me of just how miserable my high school years were.
While there were elementary and junior high schools on both sides of Mount Vernon, everybody siphoned into one building on California Road for the high school portion of their education. Suddenly, I was thrown in with a whole bunch of those kids from the north side. In fact, once ninth grade came around, I saw little of my friends from the early years except for a quick glimpse in the hallway when classes were changing.
Indeed, I found most of the north side students a little pretentious. And not very welcoming. It could have been my imagination. I tended to shyness anyway. But, three or four months into my high school years, my usually low self esteem sunk to 20,000 fathoms under the sea. I retreated into my inner self.
I went to my classes and did little else. When I hear today about how the children of my friends are so relishing high school, I am a little wistful. I would have liked to do the class play. I would have liked to sing in the school choir. I would have liked a few more friends.
Instead, 3PM could not have come sooner every afternoon. In fact, during my junior and senior years when I figured out how to stack your classes, I was usually on my way home by 1PM. Escape on a daily basis was my goal. If there were dances, I wasn't there. If there were group trips, I wasn't on them. The closest I came to any extra socialization was sticking around occasionally for a school basketball game.
My high school years were as empty as could be. And when I graduated, I looked around and could say without equivocation that I had made only one really good friend in high school. The good news is that person remains one of my closest friends to this day. But that was it.
Oddly enough, as I read the Facebook threads of some of those north side kids, all my past feelings of low self esteem started to return. Oh, I'm sure most of them are sterling adults. But not being welcomed or comfortable with them decades ago was still a lingering sensation.
Miraculously, as soon as I got to Fordham University and started to work at the radio station there, my funk disappeared and I was out of the shadows again. The number of friends I have from college that remain to this day is plentiful...the polar opposite of relationships I developed in high school.
So, with the inadequacy-o--meter stimulated by the high school discussions on Facebook, I began to consider not going to the upcoming reunion at all. The jury is out. But I will tell you another thing without equivocation.
If I do go, I will be sitting with all my friends from elementary and junior high school. With a smile on my face.
Dinner last night: Vegetarian lasagna.
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