Year 15

Let's begin with an addendum because I remembered something else about ninth grade. I remember being in Mrs. Pierce's class and listening to her explain to us how to properly pronounce words in Spanish. I remember her standing at the blackboard elucidating some finer point of Spanish grammar and someone throwing a paper airplane at the front of the class and it somehow landing in her hair and sticking there. It didn't move. It just stuck right in the back of her hair. And I hope that when I'm her age I'll be able to turn with half as much dignity as she did, almost a smile on her lips. She didn't say anything. She reached up and pulled the airplane from her hair and smiled.

Also, I wanted to apologize to Ramundo. I don't know your actual name but that was your Spanish name. Anyhow, one day we, (I mostly mean Marc Fellner and Josh Barthalomew) stole your wallet and tossed it around between each other, playing a game of keep away. The next year you bit the head off a live rat. Ergo; now seems like a good time to point out that Josh and Marc were really responsible for that incident and when you start sending out letter bombs or whatever, I'd start with them.

Picture. Let's begin with the obvious positives. I appear to be playing basketball without two bulky knee braces. I can only imagine what that must have been like. I also managed to grow out my hair and I didn't yet have a wife telling me how much better I look when I'm clean cut. Ie I want to change you, and I think this is a good way to start.

Tenth grade. Tenth grade is pretty great because you get to go on a trip to Ashland, Oregon with Mrs. Willis and stay up all night after watching some crappy Shakespearean play. When you're in tenth grade Shakespeare pretty much sucks. It's not until you are well into your twenties that you're willing to concede that he wrote a good line every now and again.

Tenth grade is the first year that it is really important to get your yearbook signed. It's great to wait all day to get that special someone to sign your yearbook only to have them right something like, "Have a great summer. X." X in this case denotes that special someone's name. And that's when you realize that this person who's signature you've been waiting for thinks as you about as often as it rains during the summer. Which is to say, almost never.

You remember being asked to a dance for the first time in your life. You remember sitting at the table trying not slurp spaghetti. And because you couldn't eat the damn spaghetti without slurping you were still starving after they took away your almost full plate. You remember refusing to dance, which is strange, because now that you're old, you love to dance. But soon you'll be thirty and not allowed to do it anymore without being some weird old guy.

Positives-You can now drive a car.

Negatives-You can now drive a car. It's the beginning of many expectations that will be put on you and when you actually think of the astounding number of people killed in car accidents it shocks you that you were allowed to drive at sixteen.

You remember your sister trying to give you a driving lesson. The car didn't have power steering and you didn't want to yank the wheel, so you drove the car up on the lawn. "We'll try again tomorrow." She said. But you knew that she was lying.

Positives-Basketball. It was actually fun to play for the first time since you left grade school.

Negatives-You can't come home and drink a cup of coffee followed by two glasses of wine. This is the nice part about being almost thirty.

Positives-You don't get stressed out because you didn't get enough work done.

Negatives-People can still tell you what to do even though you're starting to be an age when you're pretty certain what you want to do. This conflict causes problems.

Positives-You can finally grow the wispy sort of mustache featured on men from America's Most Wanted.

Negatives-Mustaches.

Positives-Not spending the evening on Ikea's web site trying to determine which chaise is going to complete the decor in your room.

You remember sitting in the dark, waiting for sleep to take you in the weeks before that first dance, rolling around in bed, trying to convince yourself that it was no big deal. Maybe that's what you miss about sixteen. The anticipation of all the things to come. Eighteen, college, turning twenty one, finding someone, buying a house. Even though you are still young by the current standards you realize how many of these things that you look forward to are now in your rear view mirror.

You remember dancing close, the feel of the car underneath you. You remember looking forward rather than back.

Elegy for a silk tree
Lately you’ve begun to doubt the existence of things. Childhood has been, up until this point, full of credulity. You’ve listened to grasshoppers play tiny violins in the uncut grass, and believed that your older brother keeps lightning bugs beneath his bed, and then releases them into the sky where they became stars. You’ve developed a rich interior life for your shadow, a family, where he is the littlest boy, but the most intelligent. At night he returns to his home, the sun retreating with him behind a line of low non-descript houses.