I went back home for the Fourth of July weekend. Not to where I live now. Back to where I grew up. Back to the people who knew me way back when. Back to reunionize with the steadily shrinking number of folks who share 1960s and 1970s memories of our home town.
The organizers of the all-school reunion asked me to speak at the Saturday evening program about how our high school prepared me to be an author and speaker. I was happy to oblige, though I expanded the scope of the assignment to include teachers throughout my school years, not just the ones from high school.
I described my first grade self (pictured above with shirt buttoned up by Mom’s capable fingers and hair plastered down with her spit) as accurately as possible. Being back home, I couldn’t leave anything out – not my fingernail chewing, pink eye, cold sores, clumsiness, or propensity to pick my nose and eat my boogers – so the back homers had a good idea of the raw material our valiant teachers had to work with. In my case, and I suspect in many others, they didn’t have much.
This morning, I described the speech to my daughter. How the booger line got the biggest laugh. How I cried at the end while thanking teachers for giving me the skills to do what I do. She said, “You remember your school years with more fondness than I do.”
I thought for a moment and said, “Now I do. But not when I was your age. Give yourself time, sweetie. The fondness will come.”
She nodded a little dubiously, and I didn’t know how to tell her how her perspective will change over the next three decades. How the skills her toughest teachers insisted she learned will be the skills she appreciates the most. How her compassion will grow toward classmates, even toward those who took out their insecurities on her. How her awareness of the gracious gifts given her will make her humble instead of proud. How her passing acquaintance with classmates will transform into a highly exclusive club that gathers infrequently. How she will want to see the members because they remember what she remembers.
Because they knew her then, and they smile to see her now.
Because when she’s with them, she’s where she grew up.
Because she’s back home.
