Rock, Rock, Rock 'n' Roll High School
Certain memories of our youth and adolescence seem so much more vivid and clearer than many others. I suspect that often this has to do with the memories relative importance in the overall scheme of our lives. One of my favourite teenage memories occurred approximately halfway through summer vacation as July quietly became August doing its very best not to draw our attention that school would be upon us sooner than any of us would have liked. This summer, though, was a summer like no other had been previusly. When Labour Day finally arrived, I would be less than 24 hours away from becoming a high school student. The days of my immature and naive past hopefully fading away with the previous evening's sunset. Oh, if only it had been this easy!
For me, I was a veritable melting pot of emotions, most probably with fear and dread leading the pack. I was almost 14 and a half, and for the first time ever, I was about to attend an educational institute that had more than 100 students! The small town - or village as it was properly called - that I grew up in had a population of approx 1100 during this time period. The village was literally cut in half by the Thames River - southwestern Ontario, not London UK - and on either side of this divide there was an elementary school. The majority of the local kids attended either one or the other. Well, everyone except for me and 95 others who were also, obviously, very much at the mercy of their sadistic parents.
If youth isn't fraught with enough crap of its very own, our parents all thought that it would be really neat to send us to the Catholic school in an otherwise frighteningly WASPish village. No, seriously, I never even took notice of this very fact until the first day of high school started to get closer and closer and closer, no matter what I tried to do to prevent this from happening. I began to become overwhelmed with the fact that high school had an approx enrollment of 800 students spread across the five distinct years! Right there, this was already over eight times more than the number I felt comfortable and confident having to deal with on a daily basis. In my Grade Eight graduating class, the total number graduating in this year was only thirteen - six males and seven females. By the by, I was actually valedictorian of my class! The rest of my school's population was fleshed out by the remaining 83 students ranging from kindergarten through to Grade Seven. During my entire tenure, I was never in anything other than a split grade!
Now, kind of suddenly, I dreaded and feared starting high school. Well, almost...sort of...Know, that I didn't relish being back to the bottom of the totem pole, or a little fish in a big pond, et al. I mean, I already knew most of the kids my age that had gone to the public school on our side of the river, and then any other kids from the other side, I ended up knowing if any of them were involved in any way with swimming. OK, so now after a rather lengthy, arduous intro, we get to the event that triggered this post. Finally, after having been mega patient and waiting what to my teenage mind felt literally like eternity, I had permission, and most importantly, funds, to purchase my very first pair of blue jeans!
It will be thirty one years ago this upcoming summer when I bought these, by this point, near mythic pants for the very first time. Back in the summer of 1978, Calvin Klein had yet to give Miss Shields that still infamous pair of his very own denims, nor had designer jeans al la Gloria Vanderbilt et al been launched to an unsuspecting public! We had yet to become jaded, so sadly, or not, I was still pretty much an independent, not yet conquered my some marketing thug!
In my little provincial corner of 1970's southwestern Ontario, options for females were still extremely limited. I believe that I had narrowed my options down to the only pair of jeans marketed or made for the female market by Levis - again, I was the farthest thing away from anything remotely cosmopolitan so my choices were very, very narrow - and Lee Riders for women. Decisions, decisions, what a conundrum, indeed.
Crap...Crap...Jim's folks just arrived so I am not going to get to finish this story right now...Later, promise!
