First Day of 9th Grade

The first moments of my first day back in school in the fall of 1972 come to mind now and then.

It was the start of my third and final year at Kosciusko Junior High, grades 7 - 9.

I hadn't fit in. I had hopes to fit in more successfully at high school, but I would have to survive one more year at "Big K" to get there.

The buses let us off well before the school opened its doors, so there was a period of milling around and waiting. This was early September of course, so the business of standing around out of doors was not uncomfortable.

So: I was standing still, speaking to no one, generally doing my best statuary impression, when someone I hardly knew ran up to me. Literally, he ran. There was not a lot of open space what with all the milling around, but he had found some, and RAN up to me. Then he stopped dead short, though inside what one might fairly consider my personal space, and asked, "Did you make it to 9th grade?"

I said only one word, "yes." Softly and perhaps in a quizzical tone, because I wasn't sure why he cared. But of course I was now in 9th.

My interlocutor looked SO disappointed. I am sure he would have loved to have heard me say that no, I am here to begin repeating the 8th. He was looking for someone to feel superior over. I had deprived him of that.

He trudged glumly away.

There is a lesson in this brief exchange, and in the fact that it has stuck in my mind over the decades since. The lesson is (a) sometimes you disappoint people merely by virtue of competent persistence and (b) those people richly deserve to be disappointed.