Two reunions

It’s the time of year that lends itself to reunions: not necessarily the official, capital “R” kind with college classes or multi-generational families that take place in late spring on campuses or midsummer at lake houses, but the unofficial reunions in which holidays or other homecomings bring us together with familiar faces from our past.

I was part of two such gatherings in the past week, though only in retrospect did I see similarities between the two events. One was a yearly party for high school friends. The other was an afternoon when it happened to fall upon me to feed the livestock at my parents’ farm.

I’ve hosted a pre-Thanksgiving gathering for classmates from high school for the past four years or so. The group that gathers isn’t a defined clique, like those at the center of so many novels. This isn’t about four women who were bridesmaids at each other’s weddings or lived together in New York apartments after college graduation. It’s just a general invitation that goes out over social media every fall encouraging anyone from our class – or the class ahead of us, or the class behind us, or really anyone at all who ever knew any of us during high school – to get together.

Sometimes only my closest friends show up; other years, alumni join us whom I barely knew during our Concord Academy days. But it always works out. There are the obligatory “Wasn’t it you who” and “Remember that class trip when we,” but by the time the evening ends, we’ve always gone so much deeper than that: into what matters most to us now. Our careers, whether successful or foundering; our marriages or lack thereof, our children or the choices we’ve made not to have children; our travels; our joys and disappointments.

The other reunion took place in ankle-deep mud, and was meaningful in a very different way. For about three years, it was my daily responsibility to feed the sheep and cows at my parents’ farm. The routine began after I almost simultaneously lost my job and adopted a dog; with the kids off at school in the morning, I was free, and spending time in the barnyard was a great way for the dog to get some exercise. My farmhand duties continued until my father took on a business partner in his farming enterprise three years ago and I was no longer needed. By then I was ready for a break from the daily slog out to the haybarn.

But this weekend, with my parents and their business partner all out of town for the holiday, it fell on me once again to care for the animals. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to the task, but the minute I climbed over the fence and dropped into the mud in front of the barn, I became aware of how happy I was to be back there. The cows looked at me with eager hungry eyes, just as they used to. The sheep had the same benign gaze they always had. Retrieving the haybales and throwing them into the feeder was the same energizing stretch-and-lift workout I remembered from nearly a half-decade ago.

It was good to be back amidst the farm animals, and it was good to be back amidst my high school friends, and I hope neither group will be offended by the comparison. The point is that returning to old friends, be they agile (if increasingly middle-aged) two-legged humans or shaggy milling cattle, is rewarding. It reminds us of who we were, thirty years ago or just three years ago, and it reassures us that we can return. Familiarity is comforting, whether it comes in human or bovine form. At the party and in the barnyard, I was happy to be back amidst familiar faces.

Back-to-School Night: A kinetic, frenetic experience

Back-to-School Night at our local high school, I have come to believe now that I’ve been through two of them, is primarily a kinetic experience.

Perhaps not coincidentally, kinetic rhymes with frenetic, which happens to be another good adjective for Back-to-School Night, but I’ll get to that later.

At Back-to-School Night at my son’s school, parents are invited to follow their child’s regular class schedule, Blocks A through H, except that each block has been shortened to eight minutes. During those eight-minute blocks, the teachers offer an impressively concise and well-articulated summary of their plans for the school year, but mostly, they say “To learn about the curriculum and my expectations, check my page on the school’s website. To find out how your child is doing with assignments, attendance, and grades, log in to your parent portal account. To speak one-on-one with me about your child, send me an email and we’ll set up an appointment.”

I don’t blame the teachers for this at all. It’s as good a use as any of the eight minutes they are allotted. And it’s true that technology makes it easy to access the kind of information that a teacher of previous generations would have been sorely challenged to summarize in this abbreviated amount of time.

So as I see it, Back-to-School Night is really just about stepping into Tim’s shoes for a couple of hours, almost literally, as I trace his daily path from all-school assembly to A block to B block to C block. I get to see the halls he walks and the classroom displays his eyes rest on when he’s not paying full attention. I get to see and hear the same adults he watches and listens to five days a week.

But only for eight minutes, and then on to the next, which brings me to the part that is not only kinetic but frenetic. Tim’s school is a bewildering maze to me, an incomprehensible network of hallways and right angle turns with classroom numbers whose prefixes change inexplicably from S to I to A. Tim’s freshman year, I made the mistake of coming to Back-to-School Night straight from work, which meant I was wearing heels. It was truly like an anxiety dream come to life as I tottered frantically down the halls eternally searching for rooms whose numbers didn’t seem to exist. This year, I cast fashion to the winds and wore my running shoes, which meant I was able to replicate the previous year's frantic dash of confusion from one wrong turn to the next at a slightly faster and steadier pace, with fewer twisted ankles along the way but no greater luck in finding where I was supposed to be.

At one point, despair overtook me. I was searching for Tim’s social studies class in room H17; somehow the hallway had ended at H15 and I found myself in a dim portico between two buildings. “How can I be so lost?” I wailed out loud.

A student guide materialized and offered to show me the way. Feeling suddenly reassured, I pulled myself together. After all, even if I reached the classroom a few minutes late, I’d still get the visuals. I’d have a look at Tim’s teacher and the classroom wall displays, which was all I seemed able to get out of Back-to-School Night anyway. And if nothing else, I was getting plenty of exercise.

“Next year,” I announced confidently to the parent next to me as I slid into a seat, “I’ll know my way around. I’ll get to every class on time. I won’t make wrong turns or tear my hair out in exasperation.”

“Next year this building will be a pile of concrete,” the parent reminded me.

Oh, that’s right. The new high school is on schedule to open in April. Never again will I navigate Back-to-School Night through this particular maze. Surely the new building has been designed with the directionally challenged, like me, in mind.

But just in case, next year I’m bringing my running shoes again. And also GPS.

A new school means a clean slate -- for me!

I expected that my predominant emotion when I drove up to Concord-Carlisle Regional High School to drop Tim off the first time would be apprehension.

Instead, to my surprise, it was liberation.

I didn’t know this place, true, and that was unnerving. But the up side to being a stranger suddenly became obvious: I didn’t have any pre-existing commitments here. I wouldn’t be likely to recognize people if I were to walk into one of the buildings on campus. I didn’t have any projects under way that needed attention.

All of this may sound more like I’m the one going off to high school rather than Tim, but I’m afraid after nine years as a parent volunteer at my kids’ school, this is how I think. At our local K-8 school, from which Tim graduated last June and Holly just started sixth grade, the campus is full of reminders of tasks I’ve undertaken. Seeing the school library reminds me that I’m in charge of scheduling volunteers once again this year. The lunchroom reminds me that I need to make a vegetarian entrée for next week’s teacher appreciation luncheon. The playground reminds me that it’s time to sign up for recess duty. The familiar faces of staff and other parents remind me of dozens of pre-existing relationships that I try hard to maintain.

At CCHS, I have none of those associations. Last summer, a woman in her eighties whom I was interviewing for a memoir project told me about what it was like when she moved from a suburban community where she’d raised her family to an apartment on Beacon Hill. “It was wonderful,” she said. “I didn’t owe anyone anything. I hadn’t served on their committees and they hadn’t served on mine.”

For some reason, her turn of phrase amused me. It doesn’t exactly have the poetic eloquence of an ancient Native American proverb, but those words were echoing in my mind as I dropped Tim off for school: “I haven’t served on their committees and they haven’t served on mine.” It’s impossible to go through nine years at our local school without taking on myriad tasks and responsibilities as a parent volunteer. Most of the time, they’re a lot of fun; it’s wonderful to have the opportunity to get involved in so many child-related events and projects.

But the high school gives me the irresistible sense of a clean slate. I don’t know the reputations of Tim’s teachers or the distance between his classrooms. I don’t have opinions about his schedule. I don’t know anything about any of it, and best of all, I’m not on any committees yet. I have yet to make a single misstep as a parent here.

The time will come, no doubt: for committee work and for missteps as well as for good memories of presentations, student productions, football games. There are new people to meet and there will eventually be new tasks to undertake; I don’t know of a single school, public or private, that doesn’t draw heavily on parental participation these days. But so far I haven’t taken on a thing. And so instead of the expected feeling of strangeness, I approach this new phase with a sense of relief.

Off to high school

I started worrying about this day almost exactly two years ago. Tim was starting seventh grade. He was entrenched in middle school: one year down, one under way, and one more to complete. There was no question by that time that high school lay dead ahead.

And the mere thought of that sparked dozens of questions in my mind: questions with which I peppered my many friends who have older children for the two years that followed. "How will I know if Tim is registered for high school?" "Who decides what classes he should take?" "What time does the bus come?" "How does he sign up for afterschool sports?" "What's the dress code?" "What will he need for school supplies?" And so on, and so on -- throughout the past 23 months and well into this past August.

The problem was that I found myself at an unexpected disadvantage when it came to sending Tim off to high school. Since my children are growing up in the same town in which I was raised, ever since kindergarten, Tim has attended the same school I attended. This year, ninth grade, will be the first time I've ever sent him off to a school where I don’t already know the smell of the hallways, the sound of the between-class shuffle, the feel of the humid food-tinged air in the lunchroom, the location of every lavatory. Since he's going to the public high school and I attended a private school, I know almost nothing about the institution he's about to enter. In fact, after two weeks of pre-season football training, he's already spent more time on the high school campus than I have in my entire lifetime thus far.

But ironically, looking back now to when he started kindergarten, I realize the sense of familiarity I had back then was actually somewhat falsely rooted. My belief that I knew the school inside and out turned out to be misguided. I would discover in the course of the weeks and months that followed that the kindergarten classrooms had moved. The cafeteria had been rebuilt. The schoolday schedule was different. Recess was held on a different part of the campus. Even the buses used a different entrance from when I was in school. So for all my complacency, believing I knew the place inside and out, it turned out there was plenty I didn't know about my old school by the time Tim arrived.

Somehow, even without my ersatz expertise, over the past year Tim has managed to get registered for high school classes, to gather the school supplies he thinks he'll need, even to navigate his way through two weeks of freshman football training already. And I know that tomorrow, he'll start learning his way around campus with no help or input from me. Because it turns out not to really matter whether I feel ready for this particular milestone or not. Freshman orientation starts tomorrow, and Tim feels ready. If I'm not so sure I'm ready, that's my problem, not his.

I like to think it's because of his nine happy years at our local K-8 school that he's able to make this transition so confidently. I'm the one who is filled with uncertainty. But no one is particularly concerned with how I feel. Unlike kindergarten walk-through, parents are not invited to freshman orientation at Concord-Carlisle High School. Tim will make his own way, and even if it's all unfamiliar to me, it will all be familiar to him within a matter of weeks. He'll do this transition without me. And hard as that may be for me to accept or envision, some part of me knows -- and celebrates -- that it's exactly as it should be.

All new to me

Since fall of 2004, I’ve been receiving emails addressed to “Class of 2013.” This is my 14-year-old son’s official designation at the Carlisle Public School: class of 2013. So when I received an email last month addressed to “Class of 2017,” I was momentarily puzzled. 2017 – where did that come from? I wondered. A misprint?

Oh, right. We’re halfway through Tim’s eighth grade year. This is our first official correspondence from the high school he’ll attend next year – where he will, in fact, be part of the class of 2017.

The email was an invitation to eighth grade parents to attend tonight’s tour and presentation at the high school. And at first, I avoided putting it on my calendar. The whole idea of high school fills me with mild anxiety. It doesn’t seem to bother Tim a whit, but it is certainly bringing out my insecurities.

At some point recently, it occurred to me why this was. Tim started attending the Carlisle Public School in kindergarten and is now in his ninth year there. As such, he is following the same course I did. I graduated from the same K-8 school he’ll soon graduate from, but I did not attend the public high school, as he will. So next fall, for the first time in nine years – and effectively for the first time in his life, if we don’t count preschool – I’ll be sending him off to a school that wasn’t once my school. A campus with which I’m almost entirely unfamiliar. A cafeteria in which I’ve never sat down to lunch. An auditorium within which I’ve never attended an assembly. Hallways whose smells aren’t a part of my earliest memories. This will all be new to me – and within his first day or two there, Tim will know the school better than I do.

But when I finally took the time to read through the email and realize that tonight’s presentation was truly the first signal that Tim would soon be off to high school, I had to confront the fact that the anxieties were all mine, not Tim’s. He doesn’t talk about high school much, but when he does, he’s sanguine. He’s looking forward to a bigger campus, the possibility of playing freshman football, and having classes with some of the Concord kids he’s met through regional baseball teams over the years. And he’s not apprehensive at all that he’ll be off to a place with which his mother is unfamiliar – that’s my issue, not his. In fact, he seems to know more about it already than I do. A few days ago, for reasons I can’t remember, Holly asked him where high school kids go for Spanish class. “The L building,” he replied nonchalantly. 

“The L building?” I repeated nervously. The campus is that huge – they have Buildings A through L? Or even more?

“L for language, Mom,” Tim said. How he knew that I don’t know, but it turned out he was right. Foreign language classes are in fact in the L building.

By the time my younger child is graduating from eighth grade and getting ready for high school, it will all feel familiar to me. Maybe it will even feel familiar to her, as a second child. So tonight I’ll head off to the high school for the first time as a prospective high school parent, and maybe then I’ll feel less apprehensive. Last time Tim entered a new school, he was five years old and following in the same footsteps I’d set 32 years earlier. This time it’s all new. But he’s not concerned, and so I will try not to be either.