Do you remember your first day of high school?
Do you remember your first day of high school?
Very well.. as if it happened 6 months ago.. it’s been almost 40 years .
Had just moved away from Southern Louisiana for the first time in my life, i was 13 years old.. my mother took a job in Sarasota Florida and i was starting high school there, at a magnet school for the arts, if you know of NOCCA in New Orleans , it was very similar to that .. for whatever reason i guess we didnt have the bus routes figured out for the first week or two so my mother would drop me off at school on her way to work.. ill never forget hearing for the first time ‘I Need Love’ by LL Cool J on the car ride; we cracked up because we’d never heard a rap love song before.. ‘I’ll lay down my jacket, So you could walk over a puddle’…. Other songs really popular that moment in time were Luka by Suzanne Vega, Breakout by Swing Out Sister and Fat Boys Wipeout.. at the movies id recently seen Adventures in Babysitting , The Big Easy and La Bamba…. First class was gym, i remember that since it was a pain to get all sweaty in the Florida heat then have a whole day of school left.. oh and the end of the day was memorable since I was waiting by myself for my mother to pick me up and there was a news crew at my school interviewing people about a big national story at that time.. we watched it on the news that night, cant remember what i said but im sure it was awkward…. A few years later, George W Bush would sit at my school (the elementary portion across the street) reading books to kids when he was informed about the 9/11 attacks .
It’s fascinating to me as i get older how little most people remember from their own pasts.. i dont quite have the Marilu Henner thing (Superior somehting something memory- see i cant even remember the name of the thing)- but for whatever reason memory seems to ‘stick’ in my head for a very long time, and in great detail .