Re-Graduating
In a week or so, one of my good friends is graduating high school. Some of you have graduated recently. I congratulate you. This is what you’ll come to know. Every year…it’s been four now…I am reminded of that pivotal time in my life. I don’t ever think about high school graduation, really. I don’t ever think about what the Amador Valley High school class of 2008 is doing with their lives. I have so much to worry about already—so much ahead of me. But now, as I sit here motionlessly in the dark, in the room I slept in almost every night for over half of my life…the flood gates open. I remember…everything.
It’s like I was sitting there…at the earliest point I can remember…and then BANG I’m struck in the chest by a shotgun blow delivered by the cold barrel of time; fragments of my life, sharp, tangible shards of searing memory stuck permanently within me.
Bevaix, Switzerland, 1994. I’m sitting on a lovingly painted red bench, overlooking Lake Neuchâtel. I’m wearing mittens and that jacket I remember having. Forward…scrambled thoughts…riding a tricycle down the little hill…tire swing…snow, sledding, fondue, birthday cake BANG
Sunnyvale, California, 1995. On a slide wearing a gold cape in preschool…that was before one of the kids got head lice and they had to throw my beloved capes away. 5, 6 year olds…kids who were my best friends in the world…Dominique…Max…most of their names escape me now. Overlapping conversations, words I can’t ascertain…surgery…tonsils…pain…”my…daddy died.” Probably the clearest words I remember my dad gasping as he hung up the phone, Memorial Day, 1996. Shock. Confusion. BANG
Pleasanton, California, 1997. New town, new school. Then another new school. The music teacher with that character bag that she used to call…something. The TV unit they used to wheel into the classrooms. Domino’s pizza, lunch lines, red rubber kickballs, that one girl I had a crush on. Kelly Sweeney. Can’t…..riding bikes. Falling off bikes. Face mangled……Fourth of July parties, Scott’s pool….there’s his dad, he died in January. BANG
Still in Pleasanton, 2000. Election night. Chris is at my house…the last night I’d hear from him until Facebook appeared seven years later…the last night I’d see him for almost twelve….pool parties, band, graduating 5th grade…turning and looking at the school where I had been growing up, leaving class for the last time. The same way I’d feel again in 2004, again in 2008, and again I’m sure in 2014. Walking down the path…confliction, sadness, hope. BANG
2001. Sixth grade, a new beginning. Then the towers fell. The Pearl Harbor of the new millenium. Laptops…iBooks, before the term MacBook was even conceived. Hanging out after school, ski swaps, heaps of work BANG
2006. High school. Bullshit. Learning everything; complaining about learning nothing. Football games, tailgates, offroading trips. Skiing…40 foot kickers…Van Halen. Music. Cars, car shows, driver’s license. Track…running…shin spints…can’t breathe…BANG
And then it was 2008. Seventeen years old, almost 18. I sat and drummed my fingers on my desk, staring into my lava lamp. The coagulated blobs of wax drifted lazily about. “Time,” I thought, “couldn’t possibly move any slower. Like a lava lamp.” Wrong. Like a bullet train. Like a flyby at Mach. Something so incredible, so beautiful, but so wistfully abrupt, so instant. Hours go by so slowly. Years—like fractions of a second—go by like particles through the CERN LHC. You think the second had moves quickly on that clock face, kids? Watch a calendar.
This place is a time machine. The lights are off and it’s dark, except for the almost melancholy dim light escaping from the lava lamp beside me. Photos of people clutter the hutch on my desk—all gone now. My granddad with Neil Armstrong and John Glenn. He’s gone. My other granddad and grandma sitting together on the porch with me as a baby. Both gone. I’ve got my security blankets neatly folded beside my bed, the ones affectionately stitched by Peggy, a family friend. Gone. Gone, gone, gone. All gone. The people I trusted, learned from, respected, believed in—all of them gone. Forever. I made some new friends in recent years…some of them are gone, too. As I stare at the drab, dark wall…I can see them. I project all of the things onto that empty screen from the back of my mind…places…people…a whirling blend of images in a neuroelectric thunderstorm of reminiscence.
I’m on a mountainside. Not a mountaintop…not quite yet. I have four years of an aerospace engineering degree under my belt but there’s still work to be done before I summit that. And there will be peaks to climb once the academic one is bagged. I’m high up on this mountain, though. I can see back down into the valley where I grew up. Where all of my friends lived, worked, and played for years. We were all there once, for a while. Most of us are no longer in this valley. They’ve found their own mountains to climb. Some of them are dead. Some of them are in prison. When you blow on a dandelion, gently encouraging the seeds to travel, and flower on their own, some of them are caught by the wind and drift far away before taking root. Some of them fall in place and never leave their true home. Some wander endlessly on the breeze. Some cripple and fall to the pavement, and die in the hot sun.
I look back on the valley with fond memories. I can’t believe how high I’ve climbed. Tomorrow when I wake up, the memories will have sunk quietly back into the depths of my mind. I’ve started out for god knows where. I guess I’ll know when I get there. Congratulations class of 2012. Godspeed.
