Tag: friends

Busload of memory

~ Chris ~ 1 Comment

In grade school, my friends and I would take one of those long yellow school buses that picked us up at the bottom of our street. The interior of the bus was lined with green leather benches — they fit three kids, to hell with seatbelts — and it smelled funny. A little sweet but musty, like diesel and kid funk.

The bus driver was an amiable but firm 50-ish woman named Mrs. Pelton. She had short dark hair and wore a yellow polo shirt everyday like a school-district uniform. 

I don’t know what her pants were like because she was always sitting down in that lone, boxed-in driver’s seat, the one with the huge steering wheel and hissing, hydraulic lever that operated the folding door we kids clambered through.

I don’t recall Mrs. Pelton ever hollering at me to settle down and be quiet or anything like that, but once she alarmed me in a way I can’t forget. She was driving down a sloped street and something happened — what, I’m not sure. She didn’t crash or swerve or brake hard. 

But she was shaken, and she said, “I’d rather hit a dog than a child.” A cannonball hit my belly. I couldn’t believe it. Rather hit a DOG than a child? I was stricken, my callow little head not appreciating the value of human life. Like now, I was partial to animals, loved and worried about them unabashedly. 

“Rather hit a dog than a child.” I suppose I thought she should run down some snot-nosed kid instead of a poor, innocent pup. What a guy. That moment has followed me all these years. It’s the biggest thing I remember about Mrs. Pelton, who has surely passed on by now, unless she’s like 250. 

Memories, good and bad, are strange like that — random, sticky. I have a storehouse of them, and many seem to pop up daily. Like when Tom Rainbolt peed all over my back in the boy’s bathroom in third grade, or when I learned to ski, or when I kicked a hole in our hallway wall (so busted), or when my best grade-school friend, reckless Gene, hurled live shotgun shells into a bonfire, or working at the exotic dance club or landing my first newspaper job, or …

Often, when whacked with insomnia, a dusty reel of life memories unspools in a long, disjointed movie of the irrepressible past. Some of it’s joyful, a lot of it’s painful. The things done right and the endless bruising regrets. It’s the id unleashed. (Of course everybody does this.)

I have a strong memory muscle — I recall much of my childhood in blinding Technicolor — marred by minor spells of amnesia. It’s not like I forget who I am — though that would be tremendous (temporarily) — but more like I’m not as mindful, drifting off. This is bad. Memories are magic, if I can be any cornier, a pass key to the past, illuminating the present (lessons learned, etc.). Attention must be paid. OK, the homily is over.

Beyond the life-molding experiences — playing in bands, fizzled romances, getting peed on — it’s the people from the past who stand out: Mom, Dad, first-grade teacher Ms. Brose, Brandon, Janice, Roxanne, high school English teacher Mrs. Condon, Guen, Sativa, Nettie, Shannon, Laura, Nicky the dwarf — and, of course, ole Mrs. Pelton, who’d rather hit a dog than a kid, bless her sweet, sensible heart. With those few words, she locked a place in my long, crowded bus of memory.

A little help from my friends

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Lying in bed last night, listening to music low on my AirPods, the lights as dim as can be, I somehow started thinking about my junior high school and high school years with an emotional lucidness that made me inexplicably misty-eyed. 

I mean, I didn’t give a crap about those school years, especially high school, which was a cliquish crucible of morons, meatheads and motley malcontents. Not to mention the perennially sunny, laughing, smiling ones, who only made the experience more of a four-year inferno.

But last night I was thinking about the good ones, the handful of cool, kind, thoughtful kids who were caring and courteous, interested and concerned. They were fonts of effortless empathy, tolerant of my long hair and penchant for metal, my love of books and Woody Allen, and my dark streak that could express itself as juvenile misanthropy. 

Simone, Susie, Ann, Todd, Jamie, Jennifer … I could name them all — about 15 total — but there’s no need. Yet I won’t leave out my 11th grade English teacher, Mrs. Condon, whose radical, rigorous teachings literally changed my life. 

These people moved me, gave me hope for my fellow humans. Like Leah, who brought me back a big, silly Mickey Mouse keychain from Disneyland. Or Todd, who saved me when I was about to get my ass kicked. Or Ann, who consoled me when I was suffering existential gloom. Or Susie, who wrote a lovely note on the back of a black-and-white Woody Allen postcard. And so forth. How great are they? 

I don’t know why this all came rushing back to me one random night. It was odd and overwhelming. Maybe a particular song on the AirPods triggered lightly buried memories. Maybe I was feeling sentimental. Maybe I took too much Clonazepam. 

It’s unusual but not uncharacteristic, such a mood. I can get sappy about people, as we all can. But I tend to view our species from a glass half-empty stance. My faith in us is shaky. I can be hopelessly pessimistic. Years ago, Apple offered free engravings on its iPods. I chose Sartre’s famous maxim: “Hell is other people.” I thought it was funny. Sort of.

Last night was eye-opening. It just reminded me: People are terrible. People are sublime. 

Why I’m never going to my high school reunion

~ Chris ~ 3 Comments

My high school reunion is fast approaching. There is no way in hell I’m going. 

The reasons are obvious: the cringing awkwardness, the burning mortification of being reacquainted with people you could barely stand to look at decades ago, the screaming wish to not be there, the horror, the horror.  

I’ve skipped all of my high school reunions and have no plans to attend future ones. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed a coterie of close friends in high school, not to mention several satellite buddies and many gal pals. I was popular with all kinds, even though I generally abhorred the conceited, pathetically delusional jocks and cheerleaders. 

I had the time of my life with those friends, especially my best friend, Ian. The two of us even went to the same college, where he met his future wife, gleaned new interests (like money), then our paths began to diverge. 

We were doomed to lose touch. By late college and beyond he’d become something of a boor, intellectually incurious, cerebrally inert. His cultural immaturity, which manifested itself as an irrational hostility towards the arts, books, fine food and world travel, made him a hopeless philistine, a materialist contented with easy mediocrity and smug conventionalism. (I can only imagine how he’d deem my very different life.) Except for wine, women and song, so to speak, we had zip in common.

It’s a shame. We’ve exchanged occasional emails over the years, but nothing’s clicked. We are different people, only vaguely relatable, and that happens. Still, if there’s one person I’d go to a high school reunion with, it’d be him. 

But that won’t happen. From what I’ve gathered, I think he’s also boycotted the reunions, those sad, saggy assemblies of forced jollity and shattered dreams. Now, I know oodles of people genuinely enjoy these things, going so far as to head organizing committees and track down fellow alumni and all that crap.

What a dismal business. High school was mostly rotten, with the exception of my friends and our extramural activities (huh-hum), the rock bands I played in, and my junior year English teacher, who taught me about 80 percent of what I know about art, life and literature. Recently I wrote this about those days:

“My California high school was a miasma of mediocrity: Clorox-white, suburban, middle-class, filled with dullards and animated by cliquey teen clichés — jocks, stoners, nerds, punks, cheerleaders — ‘The Breakfast Club’ writ eye-rollingly real. This callow pimple-verse was of course dominated by the chest-thumping jocks, those entitled, vainglorious meatheads, who actually believed they were special and that anyone but them gave one goddam about a Friday night football game.”

I was an angry teen, see, which is scarcely uncommon. And it sounds like I hold a grudge, which I kind of do. Yet I’m not blaming anyone for my misery. People are who they are, and who they are as teenagers isn’t necessarily who they become.

But all I know are the characters I knew in high school. And yet maybe that bullying jerk is a benevolent, cherub-cheeked pastor now. And maybe that overbearing chirpy cheerleader is an amazing New York sculptor. Could be. 

I’m not chancing it.