May 22, 2013

• 16 at 16 (second 8)

  9) I had my first girlfriend, a cute Asian-Canadian girl. She was 5’0″ and I was 6’4″. For two or three months, we sat together in church and youth group, I walked her home from school, we talked on the phone. I held her hand once or twice. It was heavenly. She broke up with me after church one night. I spent a delightful week moping around my dorm room listening to extremely early BeeGees and Traffic’s Shootout at the Fantasy Factory. It was fun to be so miserable.

  10) I was very briefly in a fight! At volleyball one afternoon, R suddenly ran onto the court, grabbed my little brother, and started pounding on him. (Fortunately his wild punches didn’t connect much.) I was as shocked as everyone else, but I found myself lunging under the net and knocking R over. After a few words, he took off running to blow off his steam (turned out my brother had been tossing pebbles at him), and we went back to playing volleyball.

  11) I took several of my courses by correspondence. It took me all year to get through the first semester of Algebra II, so I had to take the second semester home with me for summer vacation. Mom told me I couldn’t go to summer camp until I finished it, so I worked hard on it every day and got through in just over three weeks. It was the first time I could remember math being fun and interesting (although geometry had been all right). Parabolas, graphs, logarithms, imaginary numbers… cool stuff.

  12) Most of us juniors took typing, also by correspondence, using massive mechanical typewriters on which we were expected to reach 40 wpm. I still remember the speed exercises: “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.” The final exam consisted of creating a complicated document with multiple carbon copies. Each mistake had to be corrected on all the copies.

  13) Since I wasn’t dating anyone when the spring banquet came around, I invited a girl I wasn’t really interested in. We sat with R and K, who weren’t a couple either but had come together. It turned out to be a lot of fun; R was good to joke with, and I liked K. I had a packet of flash paper, and periodically I would wave my hand over the candle and send up a fireball.

  14) For that high school banquet, Murray and I produced a tape of songs and commercials and radio patter. I pretended to be a Chinese disk jockey named Tong Chung Lung, and spoke in a stupid accent. The commercials were amusing, although I suspect we had a lot more fun making them than the banqueters had listening to them.

  15) My biggest regret of that year: I was named editor of the school yearbook. Murray took a ton of pictures, and we kicked around ideas, but I never got a team together, and eventually it was too late. So there was no yearbook that year. No one ever said anything to me about it, but in retrospect I still feel bad. (At the time I shrugged it off. That’s how flaky I was.)

  16) The next summer my family went to Kansas City for my sister’s wedding. I got my learner’s permit, and three days later took my driving test. I did a lot of driving those two or three weeks, and then helped with the drive back to Miami. We had borrowed a 1967 or 1968 Mustang with push-button gearshift, a row of buttons on the dash.

  • 12:57 pm
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