30th Reunion

“Tut, Tut, child,” said the Duchess. “Everything’s got a moral if only you can find it.”
Lewis Carroll. Alice in Wonderland, Chap. viii.

Timeline 04:32h June 09, 2011

On a gloomy and gray winter day (wasn’t it always thus in high school?) I shuffled into the lunch room with my crummy leftover meatloaf sandwich (carefully prepared the night before by my ever-loving mother. Poor dear: she never knew I chucked the brown bag lunches she made for me into the trash can each morning on my up the driveway. I am surely going to hell.)
Anyway, I plopped down at the lunch table. It was my junior year. Directly across the table from me was a kid I grew up with; our parents were longtime friends from old Peekskill.
This kid had a harsh nickname. I remember it was laid on him in the ninth grade, on the JV lacrosse bus by the group of guys a grade ahead of us, some of whom had a knack for that particular brand of cruelty. I never really gave the moniker much thought (I should have), as I knew the kids who came up with the label, and I knew the kid who got the label. None of it fit together, it was all crummy, it wasn’t right, and it wasn’t fair. Almost nothing was at that time.
So as I sat down I said to the kid across the table “Hey, what’s up %!#-@!*%#”? Then I looked up at him. He mirrored the weather, and he mirrored me, almost exactly: stark and pale, glowering, dark and gloomy. His parka was hunched up around his ears; his face was red and sore with acne. His eyes were full of anger and pain. He was even eating a crummy sandwich, too.
He looked me dead in the eye and said: “If you ever call me that again, I will kill you.”
And he meant it. Man, did he ever mean it. And he was so very right. And I was so very wrong.
The table, maybe even the lunchroom, went silent. And I thought, ‘oh hell, here we go…’ How do I tell the kid, the table, the entire lunchroom, that I didn’t mean anything by it? Why was he deciding to speak up now? Everybody called him that. And why call me out? Why not go after the crumbs who gave him the nickname, or someone who meant it derogatively? I was just saying hello to a friend…
And that, of course, was the point. We were friends.
I think I mumbled a feeble “sorry”, and shriveled up inside of myself (again), and sat there, hunched over my cold meatloaf sandwich, with my cheap parka up around my very, very, very red ears.
How I hated high school…
That moment was a life lesson, and resonates with me to this day. It’s a lesson that I’m still learning, and probably will be forever: why can’t I just shut up, and think — really think — before I speak? It got me in trouble then, and it gets me in trouble now.
n.b: In 2008, while this website was just getting started for the 30th reunion, I regained contact with the aforementioned, and told him this story. He had forgotten about it completely. I then offered a very real, very sincere apology. And I know in my heart that it is still not enough.