High School Errata

I remember Garry forgot his homework at work and ran to the Sportsplex, without throwing on his winter coat and boots, to retrieve it. I told him that was crazy, that it was -30 out there and that he would freeze his ears off. He shrugged my concern off, and he didn’t.

I remember my high school parka. It was long and beige and reached past my knees. The hood zipped up until it was a long tube that projected from my face. It served me well on those long cold walks to and from O’Gorman.

Between the spring of ‘82 and the spring of ‘83, Lord of the Rings was all the rage. I’d just begun playing D&D and was keen to get a copy. I read it during all my free moments, even while walking home from school.

Not that many of my high school friends were interested in D&D. John Lavric expressed his. I brushed him off. I didn’t mean to, not in a mean way. But I did. I said it was fairly complicated and would take some time to teach him. I didn’t think he would really be interested (he was a car and snowmobile type guy, after all), not really, and it was largely a lifeguard clique thing. So, yeah, maybe I was just being an ass. I don’t know if he was insulted by my brush off. It was certainly pointed out to John as such by Danny Loreto. It thought Danny was a dick for pressing the issue, but Danny and John were pumping iron then together and maybe he was jealous for John's attention.

All those nights at the movies, those classic bits of pastime and drivel, that, once we watch again in our middle years, we are sometimes horrified by how bad they were, but weren’t then: Heavy Metal, The Dark Crystal, the Secret of Nimh, Beastmaster, what have you. There were gems in there, too, but as I recall all those John Hughes films were released in my college years and not in my high school ones. Those and others would come later: Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Diner, Reality Bites. After GenX had kicked in, in earnest, in all its angst and glory.

I'll never forget how serious Garry was when dancing. His moves were smooth, erratic, detailed, practiced. He and his sister Sharron had spent hours refining their moves. Come to think on it, so had Karen and I. So, there may be others out there who’d marvelled at my dancing technique, too.

There are more of these dropped threads, a lifetime’s worth. And I’m sure that I’ll remember more, and better ones, the moment I’ve written this. But I can’t put them all here; there are far too many of them. We all have them, those little moments that fill our time and memory, brought forth again by a smell, a glimpse of a picture, a little thing that your child does, a scene in a film. They rush in, linger for but a moment, and pass, sinking back into those murky depths they came from.

Cherish them when they do. Relive their wonder.