It Was the Last Night

It Was the Night Before

It was the night before the first day of school – always a time of high emotion for me. When I was in elementary school, it was a time of great excitement, as it would provide an opportunity to see friends that I hadn’t seen during the summer. I could catch up with their lives, and I could tell them about the highlights of my summer. But this year is much different from that. I am entering high school now, not returning to the elementary school of my earlier years, and I will not know anyone in my class. 

My family had moved in July. My parents had wanted to move to a larger town, where their flower shop would hopefully be more prosperous than the previous one had been over the last few years. My sister and I had no choice in the matter. Our protests fell on deaf ears as the expression goes. We had to be moved from friends and the familiar, to strangers and the unfamiliar, not an easy situation to endure for a teenager.

This is particularly so as I was born in the wrong generation. That is what my parents say, and they are right. I have long hair that reaches my shoulders. I would never succumb to having the currently popular buzz cut on the sides of the head. It seems to me to be an act of hair follicular violence.  And I have sideburns that reach down to the my chin bones.

Then there is my dress sense.  I have never worn my baseball cap backwards. It takes some self control for me not to turn such a guy’s cap around when I approach him. I have never seen a girl wear a cap that way, and I hope that I never do. But I suppose it happens, or will in the near future. I often wear tattered old jeans, but they are not fashionably ripped, a style that seems to me recently to have be extended to a few males as well as females. I have had to several times resist saying ‘you dress like a girl’ to such a male.

The music I listened to is either sixties or seventies, nothing  that even has the slightest hint of rap. My musical heroes are rockers such as the Rolling Stones, Steppenwolf, Pink Floyd and the Eagles, and I have the t-shirts to prove it.

Meeting Your Schoolmates

On this night there is what the school administration calls ‘Meeting Your Schoolmates,’ It is kind of cutey pie name, but I still plan to attend it. This meeting was probably thought to be useful for students like me that did not come from the junior school that was side-by-side with the high school. The students from that schoool were said in the local paper to make up a little more than two thirds of the students in the first year of high school. Almost all of the others would be coming from the much smaller junior school on the other side of town. At least they had allies that would attend with them, those who they had gone to school with for years.

He Enters the School

As I approached the school, I had visions of the Stephen King movie ‘Carrie’ dancing inside my mind, only this one had me as the male lead. In the picture in my mind, I was standing on the stage, all dressed up, and with a girl by my side, who had been coerced into being my date. My mind’s eye looked up and saw the pail of pig’s blood overhead that was destined to pour all over me. I wished I hadn’t seen the remake of the movie last week on the television.            What had I been thinking? 

Without really thinking about it, I was wearing my Mick Jagger t-shirt. That would set me up as different from the others right away – an easy target for possible verbal abuse, pointing and staring. But I still wore it. I wasn’t going to back down from my music.

As I walked into the school building, I saw that most people were clustered in groups I imagined reflected the local juniot school that they had gone to before this day. Things didn’t look good for me. I felt like an alien on this planet. “Take me to your principal.”

There was a stage in the room. It had instruments, microphones, and amps all set up for playing. So there was going to be music. I walked up to the stage to have a closer look. It would give me something to do, so I might not stand out as a loner.

As I stood there, I felt a tap on my shoulder. When I turned around, I saw that it was a guy that I had met at an ‘oldies concert’ a few weeks back. As two of the few younger people at the concert, we had easily found something to talk about on that occasion. The first thing he said to me was, “You’re going to like these guys. I’ve heard them play before.” Then he pointed to the girl standing beside him and said, “This is my sister, Sandra. She’s a fan of their kind of music too”

As I nodded my head at her, I saw that she was wearing an Eagles ‘t-shirt’. My first words to her were, “I’ve got a t-shirt just like that.” She smiled. I wished that I had worn it tonight.

A few minutes later the musicians walked onto the stage. The singer and the lead guitarist were obviously significantly older than the others, who were more my age. The singer announced the band as ‘Generations’. Then he said a strange thing.

“Our first number is going to surprise you, given that the lead guitarist and I are both teachers here at this school. Our bass player and drummer are students. We’re going to change the words to this well-known song a bit to tell you about this school.”

Then they started to play, beginning the song with “You will get an education.” They changed the words to Pink Floyd’s 1979 hit, “Another Brick in the Wall” in several places. It began with:

You will get an education.

But you won’t get any thought control

There’ll be no sarcasm in the classroom.

Teachers, give those kids a home.

There was general laughter from the audience, and I was fist-bumped by some guys who stood beside me. 

The next song was an oldie as well: “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”. I asked Sandra to dance with me. She gave me a smiling ‘yes’, and told me that she liked my Mick Jagger t-shirt. I think I’m going to like it here.