How to Crush Without Being Crushed

At the end of seventh grade, a wonderful young woman took the time to sit down next to me one day at the end of a band period. There had been a particularly obvious display of how my peers treated me that day. Her boyfriend at the time was involved in that display.

It was almost like something out of a John Hughes film.

As I sat sullenly in the auditorium, she came and sat down next to me.

“Hey,” she said. “You shouldn’t pay any attention to them. You’re a pretty OK guy.”

And then, she left.

At the end of that year, she moved on to the high school while I suffered through one final year of hell.

But about halfway through that year, her words finally took root and began to grow.

Karen wasn’t one of the three that kept me alive through high school, but she was the first one of my peers to take the time to actually tell me I was worthwhile. She’s also the first girl I had a serious crush on in those fragile years that didn’t cringe when I came near. We were never great friends, but I always had a tremendous amount of respect for her.

That seed she planted grew into a full-blown tree of strength by the time I hit high school. It was something I could always fall back on. And after I divested myself of my toxic obsession with the girl my “friends” had convinced me I was madly in love with (regardless of the fact that she wouldn’t even give me the wrong time of day or breathe in my direction), I could see clearly the truth in those few words.

Because of that, I was open to the idea that I could positively affect other people’s lives. Not that I had any clue how I could do that, especially with my own so hopelessly messed up.

That, dear friends, is where my Three Maidens come in. Kristen, Jill and Sarah.

I recently mentioned Kristen. Jill was another flute player in band with me and one of Kristen’s best friends. Sarah played violin in the orchestra, just a stone’s throw from the band room, and could often be found with Kristen and Jill.

Little did I know when I stepped into the wilds of high school and reconnected with these three women just how important they would be to me…

(To be continued… because I started writing this way too late and need to sleep…)

Tags: friends

After three hellish years in middle school, I was determined to make as clean a start as possible in high school. I was back in with people I could relate to better (those a year ahead of me) and there was a larger pool of potential friends (a whole extra year, as a matter of fact). So I decided to try some new things.

One of those things was Key Club. There had been no school-based community service group in the middle school, so getting involved with Key Club was something very new. The only other community service experience I had back then was through Boy Scouts and the little bit I was required to do as part of my Confirmation sacrament class (yep, back when I was still technically Catholic… but that’s another story for another time). Key Club was something different. It was co-ed, it spanned all four classes of students, and it had competition to contend with (from the school’s other community service group, Interact, sponsored by Rotary).

As soon as I attended the first meeting, I knew I’d found a good place. There were faces I recognized right away from any number of places. Paul, the president, played trumpet in the school band, so I saw him every morning, just one tier down and a few seats over from my trombone spot. Meghan, the treasurer, was from one of the more prominent families in the county (I knew the family from church).

Most importantly, though, was Kristen. She played flute in the band, so I had met her in middle school. Needless to say, I (as well as a number other guys I knew) had a crush on her. (For now, we’ll ignore the fact that I would also eventually have crushes on just about every other girl in the club–and in the band–as well.) Key Club would be a chance to get to know her outside of band. That was a big extra bonus to the general goodness of the promised community service.

As the year went on, I was enthralled by the charisma of the club’s president. Paul was just one of “those” guys. Everyone loved him. He inspired people to do their best and made it all fun, no matter what “it” was. His enthusiasm and hard work made Key Club, band and the school as a whole, quite the experience–even for a lowly freshman like me. When he got all psyched up about the Key Club District Convention, so did we all.

The District Convention went on, quite literally, in our back yard. It seems my county was pretty centrally located to the population of New York State (at least as far as Key Club distribution was concerned) and the location for the District Convention was at The Pines, one of the big local hotels. I signed right up for a spot (and, of course, got my parents to pay for the weekend).

There was only one small problem.

I had a conflict in my schedule.

A few weeks earlier during the morning band class, Mr. Rovitz (our conductor) had been talking about the upcoming musical, Oliver. In the past, I had seen some of the high school’s productions and had been quite impressed by how good they were (apparently I missed the abysmal ones by a couple of years–there are still stories told about the tragedy that was Camelot in the 80s). I knew I wanted to be a part of the show, preferably in the pit band (since I was a trombone player, after all).

It wasn’t until I had my hand raised and was walking up to the front of the room to put my name on the sign-up sheet that I realized I had made a horrible mistake.

For a minute or so, my attention had drifted to a conversation with the guy next to me. What the “call for interest” had been wasn’t about the pit band.

It was for the musical itself.

On stage.

Singing and dancing.

Not knowing what else to do (and definitely not wanting to look like a stupid freshman in front of the flute and clarinet sections–which were, of course, composed almost entirely of very crushable women), I signed up for an audition slot and went back to my seat. Then I sat there in terror, wondering what I had just done, as Rovitz then called for interest in the pit band.

I don’t think I even realized at that point that Kristen had signed up for it.

Since I had signed up for an audition spot, it only made sense for me to actually swallow my fear and do it. And so, one day after school, I got up on stage, read some lines, sang (and I use the term loosely) a couple of bars and was eventually given the part of Mr. Brownlow. A part which, thankfully, had no song or dance numbers. Solo song and dance would be something I’d be able to avoid right up until my senior year.

When I realized the convention weekend and the last big play rehearsal weekend were one in the same, I hustled to work out some sort of compromise. There was no way I was going to be able to miss any of the play rehearsals, so it was my time at the convention that would have to be truncated. The only challenge was I’d have to find a way back and forth from the stage to the convention.

And that’s where Kristen came in. She was in the pit band and she had a car and she was going to the convention, too. It was only sensible that I hitch a ride with her. That’s just what we did.

For two nights her and I would make the fifteen minute or so drive from the play rehearsal to the hotel, grabbing some food along the way. We’d make it in while everyone else was at dinner. So we just sat and talked. I gave her a tarot reading. We talked some more. I was actually sad that people came back from dinner.

It was the most intimate and honest conversation I had ever had with a girl at that point in my life. She actually listened to me! What I said actually helped her with problems she was having! She wasn’t freaked out by the things I was in to!

The convention also gave me the chance to get to know a lot of the other people from my club in a totally different way than you get to know people in school. At that convention, school social standing didn’t matter. We weren’t freshmen or seniors, we were Key Club members. And we had fun.

But the thing I remember most is that time I spent with Kristen. Over the next three years, she’d become one of the three most important people in my high school life.

Tags: friends

I’ve been reading through old journals of mine from high school.

Some of it is quite painful. Not just because of my bad spelling and even worse handwriting, but because I had some really seriously depressed times back then. My head was far from screwed on straight and I had very little conscious clue of who I was.

Luckily, every now and then I’d have these bursts of insight. Even better, sometimes I’d actually write them down.

On 18 January, 1991, we were three days into the (First) Gulf War. That night, after school ended, there was a big basketball game followed by a dance. It was probably one of the best nights of my life when I wrote about it the next day (after a decidedly nowhere near as fun or positive evening).

What follows are the minimally edited words from long ago [with some editorial comment].

The game was good, the cheerleaders were good, the pep band was great [I was in the pep band], the Monticello team needs a little work. That’s only because they lost.

Not the dance, that was fun. Although it was only a regular dance with a D.J., not a video dance with a V.J. The music was pretty good.

I spent most of the time going around seeing how everyone else was. Most of the music went by with me standing and trying to talk or with me waling around to the beat. The slow songs, though, i did dance (not that’s a change for the better). Out of three slow songs that were played, I danced for two of them with someone else. The first one was the one I didn’t dance to. The second, I danced with one of the ladies from the cast of the play (I can’t remember her name). [I would remember later that it was Karen... something...] The third (and possibly my favorite) I spent with Sarah.

[We'll skip the who else was dancing with who and some proto-snarky observations. I wasn't witty enough then to be really snarky.]

Now we’ll save the dance from tonight [that's the one that really wasn't very good for me] until tomorrow. Right now, I want to talk about someone I’ve mentioned before and whom I consider important to my life. Sarah. [nope, not going to use her last name]

Sarah was one of the few truly wonderful people I met when I was in Oliver. [That would be the first play I did during my freshman year.] This year, we became a little closer and she read some of my poems. She is also one of the few people that actually understand and can feel my poems’ message. It is this that makes her, along with Kristin and Jill and very few others, truly special to me.

While she is physically attractive, she has a beautiful soul. Her attitude is at least as positive as mine. [When I was having a positive attitude day... I apparently had some short-term memory issues or something. *grin*] Her ideals also appear to be strong. She’s one of those people that almost eveyrone else is comfortable around. i feel I can put m trust in her.

While Kerry can be counted as the first girl I ever danced with, Sarah is the first that I ever asked and was accepted.

She would, indeed, be very important to me. Without question, she’s one of the people that helped me survive the very rough years that would follow–sometimes by just being there, other times by giving me bright moments like the one above to focus on when things got very, very dark.

We all need to remember that everything passes. We choose what we remember, what we hold on to. Given that choice, it is frightening how often we choose the negative, the dark, the hurtful. Right up until we can’t take it any more… then we remember those points of brightness and they lead us back out of the dark.

Being able to use those good points as guideposts is another one of the keys to learning about yourself through your relationships. When those real moments happen, make note of them. Put them somewhere you’ll be able to look back at when life gets dusky and the world gets heavy on your shoulders. They will serve as triggers to remind you of what you’ve done right… and of how good things can be.

The Universe has seen fit to bring Sarah back into my circle of contacts. Even if we don’t talk much and have yet to actually see one another again, it’s good to know those embers of friendship from so long ago haven’t died out. This makes me very happy.

Tags: dance, firsts, introspection