updated Scholastics Entry
Tom
In 1998, the President of the United States was accused of having a relationship of the sexual kind with an intern, to which he replied "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky". The Federal Drug Administration approved Viagra for use by patients suffering from “male impotence”. The state of California banned smoking in bars. The final episode of Seinfeld was aired. A seventy-seven year old John Glen went into space for the second time. A twelve-year resident of the Tomb of Unknowns was sent home to his family. Google was launched. United States embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were bombed. The state of Minnesota elected a former professional wrestler as their governor. Osama bin Laden published fatwa.
In 1998 I turned eight years old and none of this mattered to me.
In the fall of that year I started the third grade. Third grade brought with it a lot of things: I discovered my love for animals. I found music, both in a public school classroom with a plastic recorder and in my father’s stereo with recordings of Bruce Springsteen. I lost my grandfather. I earned my first dollar. And I met the boy down the street.
The house that I grew up in was within earshot of the institution where I began my education. At eight years old, my parents decided that it was acceptable for me to walk the 300 feet down the street to our home after school let out (quickly of course, without stopping anywhere). It was on that first venture home that I saw him. He was nothing special I guess; the other boys in his class made fun of him for being so short and so blonde; but there he was, walking thirty feet in front of me on the way to his house, which was coincidentally right down the street from my own. I followed him home everyday for a week.
In my naïve, eight-year-old-brain, I assumed that he would never notice me and thus I would never have to actually speak to him. I was wrong. In retrospect, I think this maybe the first time that I realized I was wrong, and I think of this now as the tip of an iceberg. I would love to say that the first time he spoke to me there were birds singing in the trees and the sun was shining and making a blonde hair halo around his head and that there was some unmistakable binding force that pulled us together, but the truth is that I don’t remember the date, or what the weather was doing, or even exactly what month it was, but I do remember that it felt like time stopped the way time screeches to a stand-still when you’re caught with your hands somewhere they shouldn’t be.
As we approached the house that I knew he lived in, he stopped suddenly and turned around to face me with disgruntled look on his face, “Why are you following me?” I could not move; suddenly I had been rendered legless. I have no idea how much time elapsed between his aggravated question and my dumbfounded answer; it felt like a year but I’m sure that the moment was drawn out and made to seem larger than life, much like your father seems to be eight feet tall when you measure a mere four feet. “I live right down there,” I pointed to my house (where I so desperately wished I was at the time) “so, I’m really just on my way home and I wasn’t following you at all, but I can see how you might think that I was….and…” I bit my lip and hoped that I wouldn’t have to say anything else at all for fear that I was not really speaking coherent words at all and that nothing but abstract sounds were dribbling out of my mouth and onto my chin. He simply turned and walked into his house without a nod, or a word of understanding, not even a grunt. This was my first self-taught lesson about the opposite species. I ran the rest of the way home.
The next Monday afternoon I found him waiting for me on the corner across from our school. “If you’re going to follow me, we might as well walk together,” he said as I walked past him. I don’t know if I acknowledged his statement and stopped walking or if he just caught up with me, but I do know that we walked home together that day. We didn’t say anything to each other the rest of the way and we parted without words at his driveway but somehow we both knew that this meant we were friends.
Tom. He was a year older than me, which put him in the fourth grade at the time we met. His mother was divorced, which was a word I didn’t even know until I met his family. They lived with her boyfriend who was tall and never spoke to anybody. He had an older sister that he worshipped (even though she seemed rude rather to me), which was another strange concept to me, as an only child. He never spoke to me at school, partly because third graders and fourth graders rarely even think about each other, and partly because he didn’t need another reason for the fourth grade boys to beat him up. He didn’t get along with the other kids in our neighborhood and so I was forced to pick between playing with him and playing with everyone else, and for some reason I always picked him. I like to think now that I knew he needed a friend but I know that I just wanted to be different.
While I wish that our story went on like a movie where we are scripted to teach each other meaningful lessons for years to come, and aid each other in times of need and not admit that we’re in love until right before one of us is set to leave for good, that just isn’t how it happened. Maybe it should have unfolded that way and we were cheated out of a movie perfect life. Sometimes I wish that I did have that life and that I was hopelessly in love with him and too proud to admit it for another third of the movie but I’ve learned to accept that things never really work out that way.
Looking back on him now, I’ve come to realize that he was your standard sad story. His mom was a drunk working a dead end job, but I wrote her off as miserable. His older sister had a serious narcotic addiction, which to my eight years experience just appeared to be an anger management problem and an imaginative mind. His mother’s “boyfriend” wasn’t really a boyfriend as much as a man she slept with so that they could live in that house rent-free. I was too immature to realize that the reason Tom never got new shoes wasn’t that he loved his old sneakers but that his mother couldn’t afford them because she budgeted all their money for take out food and booze. I didn’t understand that his sister and he didn’t just have sibling rivalry issues; she abused him because she was angry with their mother for guilt-tripping her into baby-sitting all the time. Tom probably had something wrong with him too but I was too blinded by his greatness to remember any negative details for me to analyze now.
My friendship with him was by no means easy; he was often angry for what seemed at the time like no reason and he took it out on me when we played games by throwing things at me or making fun of me, much like one would expect an older brother to pick on his younger sister. Every time that I stormed out of his bedroom and through the front door because he'd said something I didn't like, I made a big show of slamming the doors and making him (and everyone else) know that I was angry, even though we both knew that I would come back. I would come home on these occasions, all hot under the collar, and my mother would ask why I insisted on playing with him if he was mean to me and I simply told her that he was my friend and I couldn't change him and she left it at that. Our friendship wasn't all doors slamming; I could tell that, as much as a fourth grader can be, he was genuine and way past his ten years. I don't really know why I felt this undying loyalty to our strained but platonic relationship; I think that maybe I wanted so desperately to be an adult, much like every other little girl, that I thought his year of seniority might rub off on me and bring me one step closer to my future. Or maybe I thought he was my future.
A year or so after we met, his mother, for reasons unknown possibly even to her, decided that they needed to move away. To this day I wonder why they had to leave, why he had to leave me. I wonder if it had something to do with the mysterious "boyfriend" or if his mother finally lost her pathetic, road-to-nowhere job. Our goodbyes were simple, simpler than I would have liked even. We were in his backyard, catching lizards and putting them in a jar one evening when he mentioned, as if it didn't matter, that he wouldn't be able to see me anymore. There it was, my first break-up. "We're moving tomorrow. I'll probably never see you again," he told me calmly as he walked me home that night. The evening breeze blew in an awkward cloud and I felt the air closing in around me as I wondered what to say, what to do. We had never hugged before, so I didn't think that it would be acceptable for me to throw my arms around his neck like in the movies when someone is leaving for good, even though I wanted to. I wanted to tell him to call me on the telephone, but we had never done that either, so I thought that it would only lead to more awkward moments like that one and I didn't want to remember him that way. Instead, I said "Good night" just like I had almost every evening for a year and I raced up my driveway in through the front door and up the stairs to my room where I pressed my face up against my window and watched him walk away, out of my life. And it was over, just like that, as quickly as we had become friends, we were friends no more.
I'd like to say that my life was dramatically changed by his leaving our little neighborhood, but it wasn't, not at the time anyway. Life went on. When you're eight and nine years old you don't dwell on things like adults do, or even like teenagers do. I guess it's because you're still to busy learning about all these new things and all the possibilities that are still waiting for you to mourn the loss of what you've missed already. It's hard to preserve a void when there are things being hurled at you trying to fill any hole you might have every minute that you're awake. I went back to playing with the other kids in the neighborhood, and nobody ever said anything about him, as if he had never been there and they had never beaten him up or thrown rocks at him and I had never befriended him.
A few years later I found out from a friend, who found out from a friend of a friend of someone that Tom and his mother had died in a car accident that morning on the way to their new house. I didn't know how to handle the death of a friend anymore than I had known how to handle him moving so I guess the best way to sum up my reaction to this news is to say that I didn't have a reaction. I think somewhere in my head all that time I had been holding onto thoughts and fantasies of him coming back to me, riding in on a white horse and coming home to stay. I let go of that idea, but I still didn't let go of him. I kept looking for him as though he was waiting right around every corner even though I knew that he wasn't. I assumed, in a childish manner, that if I didn't accept this news, I could make it untrue. And so that's what I did, I didn't accept this news at face value, I took it as invented trivia and went on with my life. I locked away my memories of him in a place where I could keep them just for myself, just the way they'd been: open ended.
Just a few days ago, I was walking around that neighborhood where we grew up. I walked past my old house. The trees that we planted when I was small had grown just like I had and blossomed into full-blown trees that you could climb if you so desired. I didn't intend to, I don't think, but I walked to his old house, the yard was still unkempt and it looked as though it hadn't been painted since he had lived there. There were men inside, ripping everything apart, disemboweling that old house like a murder victim. I guess someone finally bought it and realized how ugly it was. All over the yard there were bathroom sinks, and tile, and kitchen faucets and doors and windows and all these other things that I had touched and used. Lying on the grass near a rotted out door was a dead bolt that had undoubtedly fell out of the door when it was chucked onto the lawn. I picked the lock up and wiped off the rotten wood that was left clinging to it. There was nothing left for me to see there so I turned around left, walking hastily away from the old dilapidated house. The lock was cold in my hands but I held it tight to my chest anyway.
In 1998, the President of the United States was accused of having a relationship of the sexual kind with an intern, to which he replied "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky". The Federal Drug Administration approved Viagra for use by patients suffering from “male impotence”. The state of California banned smoking in bars. The final episode of Seinfeld was aired. A seventy-seven year old John Glen went into space for the second time. A twelve-year resident of the Tomb of Unknowns was sent home to his family. Google was launched. United States embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were bombed. The state of Minnesota elected a former professional wrestler as their governor. Osama bin Laden published fatwa.
In 1998 I turned eight years old and none of this mattered to me.
In the fall of that year I started the third grade. Third grade brought with it a lot of things: I discovered my love for animals. I found music, both in a public school classroom with a plastic recorder and in my father’s stereo with recordings of Bruce Springsteen. I lost my grandfather. I earned my first dollar. And I met the boy down the street.
The house that I grew up in was within earshot of the institution where I began my education. At eight years old, my parents decided that it was acceptable for me to walk the 300 feet down the street to our home after school let out (quickly of course, without stopping anywhere). It was on that first venture home that I saw him. He was nothing special I guess; the other boys in his class made fun of him for being so short and so blonde; but there he was, walking thirty feet in front of me on the way to his house, which was coincidentally right down the street from my own. I followed him home everyday for a week.
In my naïve, eight-year-old-brain, I assumed that he would never notice me and thus I would never have to actually speak to him. I was wrong. In retrospect, I think this maybe the first time that I realized I was wrong, and I think of this now as the tip of an iceberg. I would love to say that the first time he spoke to me there were birds singing in the trees and the sun was shining and making a blonde hair halo around his head and that there was some unmistakable binding force that pulled us together, but the truth is that I don’t remember the date, or what the weather was doing, or even exactly what month it was, but I do remember that it felt like time stopped the way time screeches to a stand-still when you’re caught with your hands somewhere they shouldn’t be.
As we approached the house that I knew he lived in, he stopped suddenly and turned around to face me with disgruntled look on his face, “Why are you following me?” I could not move; suddenly I had been rendered legless. I have no idea how much time elapsed between his aggravated question and my dumbfounded answer; it felt like a year but I’m sure that the moment was drawn out and made to seem larger than life, much like your father seems to be eight feet tall when you measure a mere four feet. “I live right down there,” I pointed to my house (where I so desperately wished I was at the time) “so, I’m really just on my way home and I wasn’t following you at all, but I can see how you might think that I was….and…” I bit my lip and hoped that I wouldn’t have to say anything else at all for fear that I was not really speaking coherent words at all and that nothing but abstract sounds were dribbling out of my mouth and onto my chin. He simply turned and walked into his house without a nod, or a word of understanding, not even a grunt. This was my first self-taught lesson about the opposite species. I ran the rest of the way home.
The next Monday afternoon I found him waiting for me on the corner across from our school. “If you’re going to follow me, we might as well walk together,” he said as I walked past him. I don’t know if I acknowledged his statement and stopped walking or if he just caught up with me, but I do know that we walked home together that day. We didn’t say anything to each other the rest of the way and we parted without words at his driveway but somehow we both knew that this meant we were friends.
Tom. He was a year older than me, which put him in the fourth grade at the time we met. His mother was divorced, which was a word I didn’t even know until I met his family. They lived with her boyfriend who was tall and never spoke to anybody. He had an older sister that he worshipped (even though she seemed rude rather to me), which was another strange concept to me, as an only child. He never spoke to me at school, partly because third graders and fourth graders rarely even think about each other, and partly because he didn’t need another reason for the fourth grade boys to beat him up. He didn’t get along with the other kids in our neighborhood and so I was forced to pick between playing with him and playing with everyone else, and for some reason I always picked him. I like to think now that I knew he needed a friend but I know that I just wanted to be different.
While I wish that our story went on like a movie where we are scripted to teach each other meaningful lessons for years to come, and aid each other in times of need and not admit that we’re in love until right before one of us is set to leave for good, that just isn’t how it happened. Maybe it should have unfolded that way and we were cheated out of a movie perfect life. Sometimes I wish that I did have that life and that I was hopelessly in love with him and too proud to admit it for another third of the movie but I’ve learned to accept that things never really work out that way.
Looking back on him now, I’ve come to realize that he was your standard sad story. His mom was a drunk working a dead end job, but I wrote her off as miserable. His older sister had a serious narcotic addiction, which to my eight years experience just appeared to be an anger management problem and an imaginative mind. His mother’s “boyfriend” wasn’t really a boyfriend as much as a man she slept with so that they could live in that house rent-free. I was too immature to realize that the reason Tom never got new shoes wasn’t that he loved his old sneakers but that his mother couldn’t afford them because she budgeted all their money for take out food and booze. I didn’t understand that his sister and he didn’t just have sibling rivalry issues; she abused him because she was angry with their mother for guilt-tripping her into baby-sitting all the time. Tom probably had something wrong with him too but I was too blinded by his greatness to remember any negative details for me to analyze now.
My friendship with him was by no means easy; he was often angry for what seemed at the time like no reason and he took it out on me when we played games by throwing things at me or making fun of me, much like one would expect an older brother to pick on his younger sister. Every time that I stormed out of his bedroom and through the front door because he'd said something I didn't like, I made a big show of slamming the doors and making him (and everyone else) know that I was angry, even though we both knew that I would come back. I would come home on these occasions, all hot under the collar, and my mother would ask why I insisted on playing with him if he was mean to me and I simply told her that he was my friend and I couldn't change him and she left it at that. Our friendship wasn't all doors slamming; I could tell that, as much as a fourth grader can be, he was genuine and way past his ten years. I don't really know why I felt this undying loyalty to our strained but platonic relationship; I think that maybe I wanted so desperately to be an adult, much like every other little girl, that I thought his year of seniority might rub off on me and bring me one step closer to my future. Or maybe I thought he was my future.
A year or so after we met, his mother, for reasons unknown possibly even to her, decided that they needed to move away. To this day I wonder why they had to leave, why he had to leave me. I wonder if it had something to do with the mysterious "boyfriend" or if his mother finally lost her pathetic, road-to-nowhere job. Our goodbyes were simple, simpler than I would have liked even. We were in his backyard, catching lizards and putting them in a jar one evening when he mentioned, as if it didn't matter, that he wouldn't be able to see me anymore. There it was, my first break-up. "We're moving tomorrow. I'll probably never see you again," he told me calmly as he walked me home that night. The evening breeze blew in an awkward cloud and I felt the air closing in around me as I wondered what to say, what to do. We had never hugged before, so I didn't think that it would be acceptable for me to throw my arms around his neck like in the movies when someone is leaving for good, even though I wanted to. I wanted to tell him to call me on the telephone, but we had never done that either, so I thought that it would only lead to more awkward moments like that one and I didn't want to remember him that way. Instead, I said "Good night" just like I had almost every evening for a year and I raced up my driveway in through the front door and up the stairs to my room where I pressed my face up against my window and watched him walk away, out of my life. And it was over, just like that, as quickly as we had become friends, we were friends no more.
I'd like to say that my life was dramatically changed by his leaving our little neighborhood, but it wasn't, not at the time anyway. Life went on. When you're eight and nine years old you don't dwell on things like adults do, or even like teenagers do. I guess it's because you're still to busy learning about all these new things and all the possibilities that are still waiting for you to mourn the loss of what you've missed already. It's hard to preserve a void when there are things being hurled at you trying to fill any hole you might have every minute that you're awake. I went back to playing with the other kids in the neighborhood, and nobody ever said anything about him, as if he had never been there and they had never beaten him up or thrown rocks at him and I had never befriended him.
A few years later I found out from a friend, who found out from a friend of a friend of someone that Tom and his mother had died in a car accident that morning on the way to their new house. I didn't know how to handle the death of a friend anymore than I had known how to handle him moving so I guess the best way to sum up my reaction to this news is to say that I didn't have a reaction. I think somewhere in my head all that time I had been holding onto thoughts and fantasies of him coming back to me, riding in on a white horse and coming home to stay. I let go of that idea, but I still didn't let go of him. I kept looking for him as though he was waiting right around every corner even though I knew that he wasn't. I assumed, in a childish manner, that if I didn't accept this news, I could make it untrue. And so that's what I did, I didn't accept this news at face value, I took it as invented trivia and went on with my life. I locked away my memories of him in a place where I could keep them just for myself, just the way they'd been: open ended.
Just a few days ago, I was walking around that neighborhood where we grew up. I walked past my old house. The trees that we planted when I was small had grown just like I had and blossomed into full-blown trees that you could climb if you so desired. I didn't intend to, I don't think, but I walked to his old house, the yard was still unkempt and it looked as though it hadn't been painted since he had lived there. There were men inside, ripping everything apart, disemboweling that old house like a murder victim. I guess someone finally bought it and realized how ugly it was. All over the yard there were bathroom sinks, and tile, and kitchen faucets and doors and windows and all these other things that I had touched and used. Lying on the grass near a rotted out door was a dead bolt that had undoubtedly fell out of the door when it was chucked onto the lawn. I picked the lock up and wiped off the rotten wood that was left clinging to it. There was nothing left for me to see there so I turned around left, walking hastily away from the old dilapidated house. The lock was cold in my hands but I held it tight to my chest anyway.