Graduation
My co-worker Beth is on a cleaning spree around the office, and our office could use it. People have compared our office to a storage room. We have extra papers from weeks, months back piled in boxes, on shelves. We have superfluous cords and keyboards and discs and parts of computers from the 1990s, the 1980s perhaps. There are just boxes and boxes of stuff, unknown stuff.
Amongst the rubble, Beth found old Wrangell High School yearbooks. She was delighted and pulled out yearbooks from the early 80s. And now Beth and Kris (my other co-worker) are pouring over them looking at feathered hairstyles and goofy grins of people we all know and love.
We saw Beth’s senior class group shot – young hopefuls on the verge of graduating. More than half of them still live and work in Wrangell and it was great to see Greg, the harbormaster, looking all cool and aloof, or Ernie, the manager at Ottesen’s, looking all proper as he still looks now, or Heidi Armstrong, a mother of six, wearing a gold chain heart necklace looking sweet and religious. It’s funny how these people haven’t shed their high school personas.
What blows my mind is the fact that Beth graduated with these people and still interacts with them on a daily basis. I shouldn’t be so shocked because all of Wrangell is based on that concept. I’ve known this since I’ve moved here. But to see these people as young as they were with these crazy hairstyles and cool clothes in yearbook pages, it just made it all the more real. It made me try to think about an imagined life where I still interact with those I went to high school with, but it’s really too hard to even imagine.
Because she grew up here, Beth knows everyone’s story, everyone’s high school boyfriend and girlfriend, who kissed who when, who had a drug addiction when. She knows who married young (everyone) and divorced early. She knows the true birth parents of kids.
Jodie is in the office now (Jodie also grew up in Wrangell) and they are recalling Sophomore Slave Day, when Monty Buness, the current principal of the middle and high school, had to wear a cloth diaper and was paraded around town on a leash. After that year, Sophomore Slave Day was abolished.
Now the two of them are talking about how Brian Merritt, fourth grade teacher, was a mean kid growing up. “He is not the Brian Merritt you know today,” Beth said. The Brian I know is an amazing teacher and father. His daughter took my dance class and when it finished, he wrote me a gracious, kind thank you email.
The people here know each other’s histories like their own. And there’s something to be said about that. There’s something to be said about the class slogan of 1981, “What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are not as important as what lies within us,” which I think is a lot more meaningful than this year’s senior class slogan, “Life is a garden – dig it.”
Amongst the rubble, Beth found old Wrangell High School yearbooks. She was delighted and pulled out yearbooks from the early 80s. And now Beth and Kris (my other co-worker) are pouring over them looking at feathered hairstyles and goofy grins of people we all know and love.
We saw Beth’s senior class group shot – young hopefuls on the verge of graduating. More than half of them still live and work in Wrangell and it was great to see Greg, the harbormaster, looking all cool and aloof, or Ernie, the manager at Ottesen’s, looking all proper as he still looks now, or Heidi Armstrong, a mother of six, wearing a gold chain heart necklace looking sweet and religious. It’s funny how these people haven’t shed their high school personas.
What blows my mind is the fact that Beth graduated with these people and still interacts with them on a daily basis. I shouldn’t be so shocked because all of Wrangell is based on that concept. I’ve known this since I’ve moved here. But to see these people as young as they were with these crazy hairstyles and cool clothes in yearbook pages, it just made it all the more real. It made me try to think about an imagined life where I still interact with those I went to high school with, but it’s really too hard to even imagine.
Because she grew up here, Beth knows everyone’s story, everyone’s high school boyfriend and girlfriend, who kissed who when, who had a drug addiction when. She knows who married young (everyone) and divorced early. She knows the true birth parents of kids.
Jodie is in the office now (Jodie also grew up in Wrangell) and they are recalling Sophomore Slave Day, when Monty Buness, the current principal of the middle and high school, had to wear a cloth diaper and was paraded around town on a leash. After that year, Sophomore Slave Day was abolished.
Now the two of them are talking about how Brian Merritt, fourth grade teacher, was a mean kid growing up. “He is not the Brian Merritt you know today,” Beth said. The Brian I know is an amazing teacher and father. His daughter took my dance class and when it finished, he wrote me a gracious, kind thank you email.
The people here know each other’s histories like their own. And there’s something to be said about that. There’s something to be said about the class slogan of 1981, “What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are not as important as what lies within us,” which I think is a lot more meaningful than this year’s senior class slogan, “Life is a garden – dig it.”
posted by Siapiau | 2:52 PM
2 Comments:
Doesn't the senior class know that Joe Dirt came out about five years ago.
- mike
Of course, knowing everybodies stories means that is part if not all of what you see when you look at them. This total context can have obvious negative and positive effects. Also, it is interesting to consider that with the proliferation of online documentation and historicisation, that this sort of history is now happening on a global scale. Anonymity is disappearing and accountability and understanding will develop further. I am waiting for the first US president that had a blog when they were a child ... or even better when they were in College!
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