First day of high school

It was late August 1979. I had just completed the last summer of the 70's. It was time to go back to school. I knew that there was so much in front of me and it looked like it would take so long to reach the goal of being a senior and be able to graduate from high school. It was three long years and it felt like it.

As I mentioned previously, I didn't have my driver's license when I started the school year. Even though my Dad had already bought me a car, I couldn't drive it. That first day, the mile-long walk seemed to take a long time. So many thoughts entered my head about what to expect from high school. I didn't know what to expect from the teachers or the upper classmen.

Once I arrived at the school, I found some guys in my class and hung out with them in a kind of protective huddle before the first class started. These were not guys I was very friendly with, but I guess we were all a little scared of taking on high school.

The time came that we had to report to our homeroom classes. Homeroom was a lot different in high school. It wasn't part of a class we were actually taking. Under normal circumstances, you would retain the same homeroom class all three years of high school. For the first day of school, we spent most of the morning in homeroom. At one point, all the members of the sophomore class went to the gymnasium for an assembly welcoming us to school. During the assembly, I saw a few other people that I was able to refer to as friends.

Then it was time for lunch. I hung out with one of my friends. We spent the time walking around on the front lawn of the school. Then we saw something that stopped us dead in our tracks: It was a pregnant girl! We were stunned. We had never seen a pregnant girl in school before. So many thoughts ran through my mind: This girl was pregnant! This girl was going to have a baby! This girl could go into labor at any minute! This girl had sex! This girl may point at any guy and claim he's the father!

After a few seconds of awkward silence, my friend laughed and said, "Don't look at me!"

The rest of the day was a quick run through of our classes. We showed up to each of our classes, got our textbooks, the teacher would talk a little bit, and then we would leave and go to the next class. I wished all the classes were that short, but no luck. At least we didn't have any homework on the first day. My schedule went like this: 1st period, PE. 2nd period, English. 3rd period, Biology. 4th period, Math, 5th period, Choir. 6th period, Drama.

Drama class was actually a solid credit class. That's because it counted as an English class By comparison, PE and Choir were activity credits. However, they still carried the same amount of weight toward your GPA.

It was in Drama class that I met someone who would be my best friend for most of the school year. His name was Rad and he had moved to Artesia over the summer from New Orleans. I will write about him more in a future post, but I will say that we remain somewhat in contact with each other to this day.

After Drama class, I went home with my bag completely full with books. I knew the walk to school would be much harder for the next two weeks. I also knew that in the future, I would have many days in which homework would be included with those books.

So I survived the first day of high school. There would be many more days of survival ahead.