Onward and Outward...

I do not suppose it's a shock to anyone that I was voted "most likely to not be noticed" in my high school class.  

It's a very strange time in a person's life, at least it was for me.  I went through a grade school with about 25 of the same kids over the eight years.  Due to the ... well, rather strange nature of where I grew up, I suppose I started out as the outsider.

I grew up near a small town called Sartell, Minnesota.  My parents were from St. Cloud, and had chosen to live where they did in, I expect, primary consideration of my father's mother.  Dad was 40 when he married, so there was that.  My father did live with his mother for many years, and staying close to help her out was what folks did then.  And boy, did they ever.

In my grade school class, we had somewhere around 20 kids who were related by marriage or birth.  That is, they were direct cousins or became extended cousins when other relatives married.  Sartell and St. Cloud are both on the eastern edge of Stearns County, which was then, and probably still is, one of the most Catholic counties in the United States.  Oddly, there was a bit of a ... well, there was some fuss when Sartell found itself likely to become the host of a new Roman Catholic parish after the end of World War II.  But it didn't take long for things to settle down.

I mention the religious angle because that did tend to ... well, cause some of the interconnections.  I grew up in farm country.  Folks had large families to help work the farms and because, over time, many of the families, including my father's, would experience the tragic loss of children.  Growing up news stories were regularly on the radio or in the paper about a farm death, from overturned tractors, machinery mishaps, or other terrible accidents.  So a big family was something to help out with all of the work.  

And some of the larger families ended up in town.  I can't speak to the reasoning, but I suppose there were hobbies and there were hobbies.  But when you have large families, they tend to find themselves intertwined quickly.  If you've got twelve kids, and ten of them survive and decide to get married, that's ten sets of in-laws.  And it pretty much multiplies just like that.  

But Grade School, or those schooling years between five and fourteen, for me, were where a whole hell of a lot of growth occurred.  I mean, let's face it - school was challenging, the place where embarrassing accidents often occurred, and even some of those puberty embarrassments happened right in front of every body.  I mean, the description hormone jungle sure fit the general description of Junior High School.  I could not help notice the young ladies in my classroom maturing, and I do know from what was going on in my house that they had their challenges with the changes in their physical, mental, and hormonal development.  I know I was getting regularly slapped around with moods, ideas, emotions, and physical changes that caused me no end of grief.  

But I think over the years, a lot of us did end up coming to terms with a lot of things and a lot of what we had to deal with.  I remember that for a few years, our recess games varied widely.  We did what was fun, but we typically ended up hanging out and doing things together.  Then the shifts started.  

For many years, it was kinda together, kinda independent.  And then in fifth grade, we started playing soccer every lunch time.  We used the end of the playground where they had just installed a pair of volleyball net poles, which became one very large goal.  The other end of the field was oh, down about there, near the big three-trunked tree, where we tried to set up a pair of construction cones for the other goal.  And we played, hard, every recess.

Then along came the sixth grade, and we started to split up.  Different groups separated off to do things together, and God Help those who tried to hang with the people they weren't friends with.  I do remember a young guy coming into our classroom as the new kid.  He tried hanging with the other five guys I hung with for recess, but it took only about four days before someone clued him in that we were the uncool kids.  So it goes.  So he became on of the more vocal mockers of my friends and I, and we stayed out on our own when we did things. 

Thus passed sixth grade, then seventh, the major sea change.  My grade school had partnered with the newly built local high school to send us 7th and 8th grade kids - 12 - 14 year old students - to their building for the first two hours of the day.  During the school year, we spent one half of the week in Music the first hour, or Phy Ed - because they had a proper gymnasium, full proper football field, baseball field, track, and all of the indoor equipment needed - including a pool - and proper locker rooms where we could change, daily.  The second hour of the day in 7th grade was destroyed by "Life Science" - that is, your basic intro to biology.  It was what nearly destroyed my interest in science, and certainly drove the nails into the coffin of any interest I might have had in any biology-related field.

Then we'd hop one bus (sixty kids) for the three minute ride to our grade school, which was where we had religion, reading, "English", math, and ... well, anything else we had to deal with that day.  Spelling and the like, as well as any sort of history/social studies.  The second half of the year we spent our time in Art or Phy Ed that first hour.  Then we rolled into eighth grade, and before you yowl, I will note that in the late 1970s, while gender roles were beginning to be recognized as something we needed to work on, my grade school class split 100% down gender lines.  Every guy took Shop class, while every girl took Home Ec.  We did switch one week, where the guys got to ... well, attempt to bake a cake, and the girls got to assemble something in shop.  I mean, we had one quarter of shop in the Wood shop, then one quarter in mixed wood and sheet metal projects.  One quarter was electronics, which was much less informative than my own experiments and work on the electrical and electronics merit badges.  The final quarter of our eighth grade year, for us guys, was spent in drafting - which I enjoyed, but it was utterly wasted due to the soon-to-occur computer revolution and the invention of Computer Aided-Design systems - CAD.  

But the second hour of the day was split between phy ed - again - and health class.  Yes, the dreaded "human biology your religious teachers might not want you to learn about."  Gee.  There were some embarrassing days, there.  But that embarrassment did not make things even more difficult.  Seventh grade was somewhat tough, in part for me, because I became a rather easy target of a couple of the more ... well, there were more than a few guys in my class who had older brothers.  And they were obviously being picked on at home and in some cases it might have fallen all the way down into abuse - bit it is what it was.  I often got the backs of my ears "flicked" when one of these guys would pass on their way to the in-room water fountain or pencil sharpener, and they'd hold their first or second finger with their thumb in a loop, build tension, and smack the back of my ears.  

Most often this was done when the teacher's attention was elsewhere, but I was easily counted on to react.  And I spent a fair amount of time in the principal's office explaining why I'd hit so-and-so "without provocation".  For some reason, somehow, that stopped in eighth grade.  Which was the first sign we were ... well, getting ready to separate. We had deeply-divided loyalties beginning to grow, because a majority of my grade school class would be attending high school just down the street at the school we'd already spent 2 hours a day in.  A slightly smaller number of my classmates would, like me, move on to the local Catholic High School.  Cathedral, one of three High Schools within the St. Cloud city limits, was the only private school.  This meant it had a pretty broad mix of deeply Catholic families who had deep ties to the institution (which is where my father and ALL of his sisters went through high school, my father graduating 41 years before I did).  It also had it's share of students who, for various reasons, were not able to attend the two public high schools.  

Nearly all of those reasons were tied to what we used to euphemistically call "disciplinary problems".  They had been tossed out or were on the verge of being suspended, but their parents thought Cathedral could fix that.  

There were two other, very much smaller groups in my grade school.  A couple of kids were headed to Sauk Rapids, which was across the river from parts of St. Cloud, while I believe one was intending to enroll in St. John's Prep - which was attached to where I would go to University, St. John's.  

As we had to come together as a class of 36 kids and realize that this was the last time we'd go through the school year together, many of us realized that a lot of these people were closer to us than some of our family members.  And we worked to compromise on our invitations for our "graduation mass" and all of the other things that were coming up, reality really started hitting home.   After we had to come up with our "Class Colors," another school tradition, we were presented with a number of previous class decisions.  Some, such as red, white, and blue were rather obvious.  Some, such as the choice for Neon Pink and Lime Green (the class before ours), were just nuts.  Then we had to come up with our two or three choices.  

And frankly, it wasn't addressed as an option, but we came up with it anyway.  The local Sartell High School had chosen as their colors blue and white.  My future High School, Cathedral, had blue and gold as their colors.  Sauk Rapids had green and gold, while St. John's Prep shared their colors with St. John's, red and white.  And our compromise was easy.  We picked Blue, Gold, and White.  

And then, a few days after those decisions, which included our class song being "You've Got A Friend" by James Taylor, one of the more popular kids in my grade school class came over to where my five friends and I played "Four Square" each recess, and asked if we would be interested in joining the rest of the class on the "upper end" baseball field for a softball game the next day.  We'd revert to picking teams once a week, if that, and then sticking to those teams the rest of the week, or year.  

We agreed.  

And way played together, at recess, for the remainder of the year.  At the end of that school year, we graduated, and left our separate ways.  I expect many of the kids who stayed in the area saw one another regularly.  AS I did not, I did not see too many of them.  I lost track of the other three fellows my my regular recess group after eighth grade, the other two guys being members of my high school class.  

While I can say I grew from kid to man in my high school years, the connections between the classmates and I were never as strong, never as profound, as some of the others.  I spent a lot of time looking up to people who had much more of their lives put together, people who were infinitely more self-confident, more talented, and more, honestly, better looking better people than I.  I tried hard, but I never crossed that line from outsider dork to one of the "in kids".  I tried.  I thought I was pretty cool when, as a senior, I'd made it into the Dance Band our school had, which was musicians who were greatly more talented and proficient than I.  I was just enthusiastic, and somewhat useful in hauling gear, and playing small percussion traps.  I wasn't the greatest vibraphone player, it was very often an annoyance, but I kept it quiet.

I often viewed myself as a necessary assistant - when the truth was I was probably more of a "slightly useful hanger on" but it was what it was.  I did what I could, and did enjoy myself, but I'm fairly certain that, when I left those school halls, I wasn't greatly missed.  

And I don't note that here so I can beat my chest and say "oh woe is me" - I am who I am, Popeye references aside, and I've done well enough.  Sure, I'd love to be a millionaire, but I really did not have either the talent or the drive to accomplish that, and I wasn't willing to make the sacrifices it might have taken had the opportunity arose.  I stayed in a job that didn't require extensive travel when my children were little.  I did move to a larger organization when I found an opportunity, and found out first off that I'd made the move at the right time (the organization I left sold the division I had been in, which would have required me to either move to Massachusetts, or get a different job), and then I learned the organization I was in wasn't a good fit, even though I thought I'd made some substantial, positive contributions.  As it turned out I had, but they chose another direction, well, that was certainly their option, and I'm sure they're satisfied with their choice.  

But I've moved on.  I have two great kids who are successful in their own right, and I am married to a really great woman who happens to have as her biggest handicap me as one of her best friends.  And I'm OK with that.  Sure, I wish I was richer, but I am what and where I am and I'm OK with how things have worked out.  I do have some things I'm working to accomplish, but if they don't fall my way, so be it.  

So I guess if I have to, I'd tell the younger me "hey, it works out in the end.  If you have a few extra bucks, do invest it in Microsoft, not IBM, and stay the hell out of the way."