Not Sure What This Is

It's quite long, but I suppose it could be the start of a short story or novel. The biggest problem from that perspective that I have with it right now is that it isn't really about anything, and an objective observer (reader) would probably say, "This is very nice and all, but what's it all about, man, what's the goddamn point of it all?" To which I'd reply, "None," at which point they'd probably punch me for having wasted their time. So, consider yourself forewarned.

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When I look back on my life, it seems so much of what I did and who I was were always determined by those around me. I wore the clothes my mother bought me, I played the games my brother played and went to the same schools my brother went to.

School. Such an odd thing, that jungle that no-one escapes unscarred. You spend so much of your time there, and yet when you think about it, it's always so difficult to remember. Or, at least, it is for me.

I envy those people who have perfect memory, who are able to recall things with absolute clarity as if they are reliving the experience right before your very eyes. My memory has always been suspect: like a stain that fades with time until you can't remember how it got there anymore, it becomes as much a part of your house as the color on the walls and the furniture.

Once we moved to the suburbs, my parents decided that it would be best for me and my older brother to go to private schools. After a bit of research, they settled on one for him, but, being too young to go to that one, I had to go to a different school for a year before I would be able to join him there. I don't remember much about that first private school other than the fact that I got chicken pox while I was there, and also discovered I needed glasses.

It's funny, the things you remember. Picture this: a young child, less than 10, asked by the teacher what the proper answer is to a question written on the board. The child looks up and sees, not a blackboard, but a large blur. They squint with all their might, but are unable to make the blur resolve into anything meaningful. Their response? Tears, of course. Tears of embarassment, tears of shame, tears of why-am-I-different-from-everyone-else.

Sometimes I think life is seeking the answer to that question.

In any event, after I'd been fitted with the most God-awful glasses imaginable – as all children in that era were – things proceeded according to plan. I finished up at my stopover school and moved on to the big time, the same school my brother was in, 3 years ahead of me.

Let me tell you, there are few things worse for a child trying to figure out their own sense of identity than going to a school your older sibling attended, especially if they're there simultaneously. Not only do you have no clue who you are or who you're going to be, you have teachers continually calling you someone else's name, someone who is probably one of the most hated people in your life at that point because they're always harassing you or insisting on watching the cartoons they want to watch or taking the red and orange gummi bears and leaving the yellow and green ones.

I was quite the brown noser in elementary school. I had to be, really. My mom was always so demanding. If I really strain, if I really think and try to dredge up my earliest memory, the one I always come back to is a memory of my mom looking me in the eyes and saying, “You can be a doctor or a lawyer – which do you want to be?” My brother, being older, had first pick: he was going to be a doctor. So, out of a sense of balance and fairness, I decided I'd be the family lawyer. Pretty nice for a young kid, huh? In any event, I had such a hunger for recognition, for the rush you get when you answer a question, that if I knew the answer I went all out. I'm talking one of those kids who thrusts their hand into the air and strains, as if that makes it somehow more noticeable to the teacher. I suppose that, as a teacher, it's a nicer thing to see than studied indifference, but I'm sure there are some days when you want nothing more than to pound that little eager beaver into a little cube small enough to fit into the inkwell on their desk.

Yes, some of the desks I sat at were old enough to have inkwells. It was that kind of school.

I'm getting a bit ahead of the story though, those desks didn't come into the picture until later. In grade 4 we had those horrible wide desks, the kinds with no back. You could always tell the messy kids from the neat kids because once a month, the messy kids would shove something into the tangled pile of papers and books inside their desk, and something else would promptly vomit itself out the opposite side. And then, once the papers and books at the back fell, out would go all the rest of them, like lemmings pouring onto the classroom floor.

Details like this stick in my head, and yet so much else is a blur. I catalogue years in my head by the books we read in English class. Grade 4 was Narnia, Grade 5 was Frozen Fire, Grade 6 was I Am David. Grade 7 is where things get tricky, because grade 7 is when we started Shakspeare. Julius Caesar, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, King Lear, and finally Othello. I suppose there are worse things I could have read. Twelfth Night is the one that always sticks out in my head. Why that? Why choose that comedy, out of all of them? And why omit Hamlet? Such an odd decision. Yes, I have spent time actually pondering that. No, not much, but time all the same.

Grade 7 marks another turning point for myself, and the school I went to, because that was the year it went co-ed.

Girls.