A surprising note arrived yesterday from someone I knew of but didn’t really know in high school. I guess that’s not too surprising, given there were some 1,200 students at Hazen and 367 of them were in my class alone.
It was a very pleasant surprise. And it also set off a lot of memories, some fond, some not, of that time in my life. So, bear with me as I bare my soul a bit here and recall that time some 35 years ago.
High school was never like Glee for me. If it was, then I was one of those kids you see walking down the hall that doesn’t have any speaking parts. They’re just there to fill the shot. I wasn’t one of the cool kids, not a jock, not in glee (I was a band-geek) and I doubt anyone ever noticed me when I walked down the halls between classes.
Even so, I was excited about starting high school. I was just 14 years old, going into 9th grade. In Renton at the time, school started the day after Labor Day. But it was Labor Day 1972 that changed high school and my life forever. And I will never forget that day.
It was the day my brother died. It was a skydiving accident. Blown off course, he had landed in the Columbia River, aiming for a sand bar that turned out to be 10 feet under the surface. He got out of his chute as you’re supposed to, but an undertow got him.
Jon was my idle. For the last two years of his life, I went everywhere with him. I think he did it because my dad was ill and he wanted me to have a male role model. I don’t think many 24 year olds think it’s cool to hang around their baby brother who’s 10 years his junior.
Those were great times. I think I learned more about life in those two years than I had anytime before or since. He lived life big and was always up to something… car rallys, skydiving, swinging from chandeliers in a bar, crashing one junk car after another into trees and lakes and leaving all the wrecks in my mother’s yard, being arrested in Carbonado for being “a suspicious character” – the list goes one.
I remember him calling my mother once at 3 a.m. to ask her if she had seen his blue suede shoes walking by… Seems he had lost them somewhere during the night and thought they might return home on their own.
Suffice it to say, I was shattered when he died. I knew what had happened even before I saw my dad crying in the kitchen. It was the only time I had seen him cry. Two of Jon’s skydiving friends had come to the house to tell us. Since they should have been in Brewster at the skydiving meet with Jon, I knew he was dead as soon as I saw their car in the drive. I didn’t really want to believe it, and for many years after I still thought he’d walk through the door at any moment.
The balance of the week was a blur. They didn’t find him right away, which is often the case in drownings. I still had to go to school, but as you can imagine, I was pretty screwed up. I withdrew immediately, and became very inwardly turned. I guess people thought I was shy. Only my closest friends had known what had happened the day before school started.
Looking back, I would imagine that it still haunted me throughout those four years because it came back to hit me again almost 25 years later. For no apparent reason, I suddenly burst into tears, uncontrollable sobbing that lasted for three or four hours. I didn’t even realize that it was Labor Day. But subconsciously, I must have known it was time to finally grieve.
I certainly wasn’t a popular kid in high school. But slowly I started to come out of my shell. As most people who know me now know, I use my humor to mask a lot of my sadness, so I began to use it in high school to as a tool to cope.
I joined the school newspaper and found my voice. I started writing these very columns, though they were initially known as ObZerrvation Points. It never dawned on me until my senior year to add the ‘R’ to the beginning. Looking back, they were pretty raw, and some were downright plagiarized, if not in words, in spirit.
I also discovered my creativity there. I designed the cottage for the school production of Brigadoon, complete with straw thatching on the roof. I managed to talk my journalism teacher into putting the newspaper editor on trial. I wrote the whole two-day extravaganza and played the prosecutor, as Groucho Marx. I convinced the band director, Dale Gleason to let us dress in costumes for the Halloween half time show. And I wrote all the marching shows to almost three years, including the two years following graduation.
I found my mischievous side as well. In my senior year, Kevin Kever and I engineered the campaign of Larry Harwood, who ran for SBA Historian. We even got the school newspaper to endorse him, which wasn’t tough since I was the editor. He ran on the platform, “When the going get tough, the tough eat prunes.” (It was hilarious back then, really!)
Larry wasn’t real, of course. We cooked him up. And because I have this odd sense that everything should look official, we forged his transcripts and created a phony class schedule for him. We enlisted one of the administration’s advisers to add them to the official school files. I’m pretty sure that’s actually illegal.
Since Nixon was in the middle of his own legal mess, we dubbed the operation Hazengate. Then Larry’s legitimacy came into question. It seems one of the girls running for SBA Historian stood outside the classes he was supposed to be taking and never saw Larry. No worries. We hired a kid to come over from Lindbergh High to be our Larry Harwood. It all fell apart in the attendance office when the guy couldn’t remember the home address we had given him.
These days we would easily be expelled for such nonsense. Fortunately, Kevin was in on the whole scheme and they weren’t about to suspend their very first 4.0 cumulative student from school a couple weeks before graduation.
Perhaps appropriately, I still have all these traits intact. I can be horribly shy when I’m not dressed as my pirate alter ego Hurricane. I am just as creative as I’ve always been, perhaps more so now. And I can still stir a mischievous pot with the same aplomb and zeal as I did when I was one of the nerdy kids of Hazen High.
It’s funny how we often try to run from our past, only to have it come rolling right back around time and time again. My entire life seems to be that way. And even now, some 3,000 miles away from Renton, I am suddenly pulled back to what I now realize were carefree days where everything seemed possible by a note from an old school mate.
Things aren’t as simple anymore, of course. But thankfully, we hold onto some of the best things from those days for the rest of our lives, while getting over any of the sadness and trauma that our formative years often held in store for us.
For me, I still write, I still create, I still stir pots, I still swim upstream against the status quo when it amuses me, and I can still laugh at life, even when it’s serving up nothing but crap. Those days at Hazen High helped make me, me.
Thanks Jon for all you taught me. And thanks Denise for allowing me this little journey down memory lane.
Fighting back a tear or two but still smiling broadly somewhere in Florida,
— Robb