Last year, I celebrated my first 50th highschool anniversary with most of my old classmates, a few of my best friends, and some of my school idols. They found me through the Internet, and I joined our class chatroom. I didn’t actually graduate with them, because I dropped out in the middle of our fourth year. But I grew up with those guys. A big number of them later congregated at our old school back home to celebrate. They had an amazing time. Unfortunately, I had to stay back in Vancouver because of a sickness in the family.
I went back to school and finally graduated the year after them.
So this year, I celebrated a second 50th highschool anniversary with
a different group of people. This batch added me to our Facebook group.
I was particularly excited because I reconnected with my
very best friend from this class, another girl whom I had been looking for in
the last 20 years. We were both 15 years old at the time. I’ll call her Dora
for the purposes of this story.
Dora was everything I had always wanted to be: she sang, she
played the guitar, she drove the family car to school. She was smart, funny,
artistic and confident. I, on the other hand, was a feral child with absentee
parents, and I lived by my own rules. I boarded with my aunt’s family, but
nobody paid any attention to me, unless I was needed to run an errand. I was
quiet and obedient. I kept to myself. I read mountains of books and magazines,
and skipped school when my pocket money ran out.
In my eyes, Dora represented the height of cool. And she was
my best friend. She was the head of our class choir while I ran the theatre
group. During that year, we won every school competition in music and drama.
One day, I copied a poem called Cornflakes, Sugar and Teardrops
from a Playboy Magazine that I borrowed from one of my friends’ dad. It was
written by Shel Silverstein. I showed it to Dora. The poem went like this:
I’m eating cornflakes with sugar and teardrops
Since the milkman ran away with you
He stole my every dream and forgot to leave the cream
So I’m sitting here wondering what to do…
Dora loved the poem and immediately set it to a blues tune of her own composition. I was very impressed.
Dora and I had our own kind of fun. We were both crazy kids,
and our teachers often looked at us and shook their heads. One time we decided
to sit away from each other and had a staring contest for about 30 minutes
during our English class. The first to blink would lose. I forgot who won, but
our English teacher called us after class because she was worried we were
fighting. It never crossed our minds that having a staring contest during class
hours could be classified as weird. The teacher kept a straight face when we
explained what we were doing.
We drew faces on our notebooks and day-dreamed during our
mathematics classes, but kept an eye on the math teacher who habitually moved
around the room while teaching. I remembered panicking when we lost sight of
her, only to discover her standing behind us, about to knock our heads together.
Dora was gay, which didn’t bother me at all. She would often
tell me about her secret crush, a pretty girl in our class. I would listen
attentively and silently wished her well. I didn’t think our classmates knew
she was gay, though, because Dora got a lot of attention from the boys at the
time.
Dora and I graduated from highschool and went our separate
ways. There were no mobile phones and no Internet at the time. I lost contact
with Dora, but I kept the memory of our one-year friendship close to my heart. Later,
I searched for Dora for years but failed to find her.
This year, I found Dora. We got reconnected. We had a long
conversation and updated each other on the progress of our lives. She had vague
memories of our year in highschool, but she did say that she had fun. Although I
didn’t remind her of our crazy highschool antics, I found some sort of closure.
I googled the poem Cornflakes, Sugar and Teardrops and found
two musical versions of it on You Tube. I thought Dora’s version still sounded
better.
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