High School Confidential

My friend Jen over at Last One in the Pool... wrote yesterday about high school.  She went to a religious school and wrote about how only those who went there would remember certain things.  (There was clearly a deeper concept in there as well, because Jen is a very deep thinker, which I LOVE about her, but I am a simple girl and that's what I got out of it.)  That got me thinking about my high school years.  It was a struggle to remember that far back, but I did it.  I started thinking, what things would you only know if you went to McHenry Community High School?  What things over the years have I told people about my high school that caused them to look at me funny and say "Wait, what? Seriously?" 

Clearly, the one that stands out the most is prom.  Oh sure, everyone that's gone to their prom in the school gym - or didn't have a prom at all - thinks it was very cool that we MCHS students got to go a hotel and have our prom there.  But when you tell them you had to board SCHOOL BUSES in all your prom finery and weren't allowed to go in a limo or someone's dad's really nice car, you know the look of horror on their face.  "You mean, you rode a school bus to PROM?"  Oh yes, we did.  And we hated it too.  But we did it, because we had no other choice.  I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong here MCHSers, you weren't allowed in if you hadn't ridden the bus.  Even if you go to prom with one of the chaperone's sons and the chaperone was already at the prom location, YOU and YOUR DATE still had to ride the school bus to the prom.  And back.  All to prevent us from partaking in things we weren't supposed to partake of.  Which we did anyway, we just got started later in the evening.

Another apparently uncommon thing we had was a smoking area.  You had to have permission from your parents, but there was an area behind the school where students could go and smoke.  But after the first few weeks of school, no one checked and anyone could go back there and smoke at lunch.  (Not that I ever did, Mom.)  I'm not sure how they justified it, but I never really gave it much thought.  It was just something we had.  Only a few years after graduation did it seem bizarre to me.

Then there's the fact that our high school was actually 2 campuses, cleverly called East Campus and West Campus.  There's a whole history behind it, which I don't really know now if I even did hen, but I'll just explain that basically each school was 9-12, and most people spent their entire day at either one or other, depending on where you lived.  But the school combined for things like sports, band, and the aforementioned prom and similar dances.  I took Driver's Ed at West Campus (clearly the better of the two, if only because we were newer!) with Mr. Mihevc, but a handful of times, I had to ride the morning shuttle bus to East Campus to participate in Driving Simulator.  Band was at West Campus, so I didn't have to travel for that, but half of the band did so I knew some of them.  I played volleyball my junior and senior years, so I got to know a couple of girls from East that way.  But otherwise, you might never have any interaction with kids from the other campus. 

Until your 20 year high school reunion, when you're trying to remember who that person over there is and why don't they look familiar, until you realize they went to East and you're not crazy or have early onset Alzheimer's, it just that you PROBABLY NEVER KNEW THEM.  (Always a relief for someone with my memory issues.)

It's obviously a flawed system.

There are other things I vaguely remember.  The geometry teacher with the coin belt buckle and the cat he always talked about.  The first year government teacher who told us he wasn't going to teach for long, just a year or two before he would go on to bigger and better things, that I saw teaching when I toured the school at my 20 year reunion.  The dances at East after the home football games and the dances at West after the home basketball games.  Having taken square dancing as my PE dance elective so many times I should have more seriously considered it as a career choice. 

But what I most remember isn't the school and weird school policies.  I remember the people, the moments, the events, that occurred during high school.  The fact that friends I had then I still talk to regularly now. With Facebook, you connect with people from that time that you never kept up with.  You find out what happened to all those people you always wondered about.  You find out they have husbands, wives, kids, pets, jobs that don't involve french fries at all.  But mostly, like Jen was saying in her post, they have memories of things that only a couple hundred other people do.  Memories of things that happened at MCHS during the years of 1984-1988.  But now the memories of those kids are mixed up with the current Facebook statuses and pictures of the adults we've become.  It's like reading the sequel to a book you weren't sure you liked much.  Maybe the sequel makes the first book better.  Or at least, easier to remember fondly.