School Dayz

I have no friends from school. A collective “awwwwwwwwwww” is NOT in order here. I don’t really want any friends from my school days. I did okay in school on the popularity scale. I was attractive enough to do okay, I was loud enough and funny enough to attract attention, I had my various cliques of people to hang with. And then I grew up.

School is odd. We think we’ve met our lifelong buds there on the first day of kindergarten when in fact we become stuck with these people based on our geographic proximity based on school district maps (or busing maps). So there ya go off to your first day of school.

Nowadays school starts much younger, in PRE-school but I’m not talking about starting school now, being childfree I’ve never had to deal with the whole PRE-school thing. I’m talking about ME and what I remember.

Anyway, off to that first day of school, thirty or so fidgeting five year olds gather together for the first time and are assigned seats in alphabetical order so now your “friends-for-life” fate is sealed by the first letter of your last name, if you don’t like the kid to your left maybe the one to your right will be more to your liking.

You wander through school trips together and teasing and taunting and crushes and all that happy horseshit and 12 or so years later you find yourself sobbing and hugging people and signing yearbooks with words like “never forget…”

But some of us do forget, we really do.

I left my hometown a year or two after graduation to move with a boyfriend about an hour away. Admittedly an hour doesn’t seem like much, I currently drive that far each day, one way to my job, but when you’re 19 or 20 years old an hour may as well be halfway across the country.

That boyfriend and I have long parted romantic ways (but remain friends all these years later) but one thing he did for me was introduce me to the people that would basically become my long-term friends. Thirty years later they’re still here (except, it seems, for the ones who have been passing away at an alarming rate of late).

How did this happen? We came together because of common interests, we bonded over things that were important to us then and remain important to us now. We get angry, we get over it, we hang out together every single night then not for two months. We roll our eyes and accuse someone of being nuts, we have our version of the nutty uncle and the too-loud aunt (sometimes I’m afraid that might be me). We’ve grown up and changed just as we’ve stayed the same and are still pretty damn childish.

Some people have moved away and some moved away…and then moved back. There are a lot of us. We can always find someone to do something with.

The other night I was enjoying the fact that I’m on my usual Summer vacation and was staying up too late. Hubby was in bed and even the dogs had (more or less) settled down. I was bored (and should have been blogging) and doing that stupid thing people do on facebook, I was looking up names I could barely remember to see if they were there (and maybe had a public profile).

I looked up one person’s name and saw that she was friends with a bunch of other familiar names so I clicked on them which led me to others. I didn’t send any friend requests because, well, I was only looking out of odd curiosity and boredom.

I was fascinated that so many people from high school were friends with OTHER people from high school. I was AMAZED. I admit I was thrilled to see that the one person who was a majorette or some rah-rah thing was still married to the football star, it’s true and she looked GREAT! She was always very nice as was her hubby and it made me happy to see that she’s now a grandma (a damn good looking one). Another friend also looked great, much better than when we were in high school together, I knew she had become a Weight Watchers devotee and it showed.

Some people had interesting lives and careers and others not so much. One person was living the good life in Hawaii but most seemed to still be living in or within a few miles of the town we grew up in.

I admit that I poked and prodded my psyche for a second or two to find out if there was some part of me that wanted to send out a friend request with the thought that it would probably snowball from there; I decided against it. I realized that despite the fact they were still just an hour or so away from me I knew I wouldn’t do anything to meet up with them or see them or do anything with them. If I didn’t have much in common with them thirty years ago I’m pretty sure I’d have even less in common with them today.

So that’s it I guess, I still won’t be going to any class reunions (I think this year would be the 35th) or reaching out across the years and miles, oddly enough, even if I live another forty years right where I am I probably will never actually see or speak to any of those people, I haven’t in the past thirty years.

How do I feel about that? Pretty good. My advice (as if you asked)? Find the people in this world that make your soul sing and make those your peeps, if you found them on that first day of kindergarten then those are them, if not, keep looking they’re out there, don’t settle.