I still haven't synched up my Typepad account with Facebook, and as I gear up for another trip to Brazil in July I'm realizing that I'll have to start a new blog. On FB I try to manage a public face that is acceptable to my family and various people I know in the context of mission work, Christian Ed., and lately - bizarrely - people from Junior High School. Now, I don't tell any lies to maintain that public face. It's not a whole lot different from who I really am. It's a kind of run-the-vacuum, flick the duster, toss-the-magazines as I answer the doorbell me.
It's the me that can laugh off bad times in early adolescence, because aren't we all past that? The me that says, if the black people in my church can reach across racial lines and Brazilians can welcome a Gringa into their homes, can't I just let it go? It's the me that nods when the SSJE brothers say that forgiving is the most pragmatic thing you can do. Until this morning when I read this headline and article in The Boston Globe . Actually, not even when I first read about Phoebe Prince or even the helpless administrators who saw nothing did I feel upset; the rage came upon me when I was reading the comments, the shock that kids these days would do such a thing.
Yes. Mon Dieu. Quelle flipping surprise! (A phrase that, by the way, would have gotten me punched in my junior high locker room.)
I can't really compare my story to Phoebe's, because after all I'm still here. I didn't date a popular guy, I just dared to smile at one, accidentally, while I was trying to get the attention of a friend sitting next to him. And technology in the early 1970's was limited. All he could do was write notes on the pads of paper we were given for math problems, pass them around to all his friends, and leave them for me to find and read - while he and his friends derived great amusement. Now, that didn't make me suicidal, and in fact it didn't last that long. Probably the whole thing went from around November of 1971 to April of 1972. I just remember it as a long, dark winter when I dreaded going to school, eating lunch, entering classrooms where I previously done quite well. It was a winter when I must have been invisible. Maybe the teachers just thought those groups of kids were laughing about Snoopy's latest antics.
My sister was always the one who counted only the sunny hours. She was just as smart as I was (and underneath the popular exterior) just as quirky. But she referred to everyone as a good kid and gave me a lot of tips on getting by, which I finally adopted. High school was a better place. I made friends. The whole Mock Love Note Winter of '71-72 faded into memory. They were all good kids, just having some fun.
That was how I left it for some twenty years, until I ran into a girl I'd known in Junior High and High School. J. hadn't been bon heah, and so had had her own obstacle course to run when she entered 8th grade in my old school. J and I spent a couple hours talking over coffee all those years later, and together we punctured each other's They-Were-Just-Having-Fun shell. We remembered the really unpopular girl that the school athlete felt up in front of a crowd in the hallway. We remembered the bathrooms you just didn't use, no matter what. We remembered the honors students who flipped girls' skirts as they walked by and the ones who surrounded people changing in the locker rooms.
In the end, of course, you do have to let it all go. Or perhaps accept those things that made you who you became, work around the stuff that's holding you back, and then let it all go. But I can't pretend it never happened.
