this one goes out to willy north

Here's what I have been thinking a lot about lately: high school.

I'm not entirely sure why. I think it started last week, when I was having my first really crazy teaching week (not one marked with anything of any real importance, but rather a lot of oh-my-god-I'm-so-busys and look-at-all-these-things-I-have-to-grades and I'm-never-going-to-write-a-poem-again-am-I?s). It wasn't a truly bad week. I never once wished I was working on a healthcare marketing campaign. But it was busy.

And so last week found me really, really envious of my students. I would give them a journal topic and then sit and look out over them, their little heads bent over their notebooks, and for those ten minutes I wanted to be them. Everything was so simple from where they sat. They just threw on hoodies and came to class and took notes on The Peter Principle. It made me long for the days in undergrad when you'd just roll out of bed, grab a chai tea latte, get to class and take color-coded notes on Teddy Roosevelt. Maybe later hole up in the library stacks and organize some flashcards on interpersonal communication and then grab dinner with a friend. Those were nice days. Those were easy days.

On a side note, doesn't T.R. usually look like he's going to bite your face off?

This week is much better. The students are back on track and hard at work on their writing (or something), the weather is cooler, Peter Ho Davies rode shotgun in my Camry for five minutes. I wore a sweater today and ate apples and laughed at a pack of fat Goths on rollerblades. It was a good day.

But the high school thing is still on my mind. Maybe because for the first time in five years, I am within reasonable distance of where I went to high school. It could be that I've seen more of the AV than I have in a while, which makes me feel closer. It could be the recent addition of Facebook, that charming slut, to my life.

It could also be that my first-year students keep talking about high school, high school, high school: oh, this new campus is so big, and it's so hard to meet people, and for this paper I want to write about how big this campus is and how hard it is to meet people. And I keep saying, no, no, no. Don't write about that.

It could be that compared to Minnesota and Wisconsin, Michigan feels much more ... normal. Like New York State. With the notable exception of the Yoopers, the accent is nearly non-existent. I'm back on EST, so The Simpsons are on at the right time again on Sunday nights. The weather map includes Buffalo, not eastern North Dakota. The drivers use turn signals. The population density and distance between cities--not villages, or towns, but cities--feels right. There's even Father Sam's pitas in the grocery stores. And everyone keeps warning me about lake effect snow. Yes, lake effect snow. I get it. LES and I are so tight, I get to call it LES.

Or maybe I'm thinking that I graduated high school nearly ten years ago. Now thirty-somethings, I am not calling myself old. But it's strange to think that it's been ten years since I sat on a filthy couch in a yearbook office or rode around town in Schiller's dad's S-10. Ten years since playing Cutthroat on summer nights at the pool hall where my friends learned to smoke cigarettes and ten years since endless cups of coffee at Perkins. Those people are now lawyers and expectant mothers and husbands and filmmakers and string-theorists. And I'm a teacher. It's taking me a little while to come around to this fact.

And it just might be that the first days of fall always make me think of school--not undergrad, or grad, but get-on-the-big-yellow-bus school. I've been having tiny flashbacks to things I'd forgotten. Like how I used to have a paper X taped to the corner of my desk: my homework X. The X was where I kept my homework--not strewn about the house, but on the X, so I'd always know where it was. There was the paper X and there were bottles and bottles of nail polish, arranged in rainbow order from light pink to black. And a Mac Performa where I played Mario Teaches Typing and wrote horrible little chapters of a book that was forever in progress, carefully saved each night to a floppy disk.

Or how waiting for the bus in the morning, I would play imaginary four-square on our poured concrete driveway, and I would practice lunging from one corner from another, fending off a slam or a spin or a dribble serve.

Or how many times the phone would ring at 7:15 in the morning, and it would be the AV on the other end: Are you wearing your sunflower shirt today? Because I wanted to. And sometimes I would just lie, even though I was wearing it, because I wore it nearly every Monday and it was probably her turn: Nah, I'd say. And then I'd change.

I was pretty cool.

Buffalo isn't my home. But it's funny how I still prick up my ears whenever Buffalo makes the national news. I can pronounce Scajaquada. I once got really, really excited when I was watching the Food Network and they ran a feature on Buffalo: Ted's Hot Dogs and beef on weck and Greek diners and the wings. And I still miss skiing with the AV on Sunday nights, under pine trees that were literally draped in snow, and the realization I had one night up on a ski lift: that Buffalo couldn't be that bad of a place if you could find yourself on the slopes--or for that matter, in Canada or out on a lake--in just under an hour.

It's nice, isn't it, to carry pieces of these things with you wherever you go. And there's something endearing about dopey high school me, riding around town in a friend's old car and listening to whatever tapes they were playing (depending on the friend, it could be Aphex Twin or Less Than Jake or Pulp or the Dead). I remember wondering if we'd talk to each other after the year ended and wondering what I would grow up to be and to do and where I would live. And what part of the map--or, as the case may be, my right hand--I would one day point to and say, Right here. I live right here.

Tomorrow, after classes are finished, I'm loading the dog into the car and heading back to Wisconsin for the weekend. There will be tumblers of whiskey at Brocach with some marketing and design folks and the BWTK release party at Avol's. The leaves will have just turned yellow, and when I roll down the window to pay my way through the fantastic toll system that is Illinois, the air will have a bite. And the collectors will be cold and surly in their state-issued navy sweaters.

I'll listen to Bon Iver for the first time since April, and to Crooked Fingers because that's what I listened to last fall. And I'll be driving west, back into Central Time. But I suspect that a large part of my brain will be thinking of the opposite--of the east, and the past, and how sometimes it just felt good to drive around at midnight on weekends during my senior year, aimlessly turning left and right and right again in the subdivisions where people were sleeping, and listening to Canadian radio, and wondering what, exactly, I was going to do with the rest of my life.