This
Journal

October
1999

What about that picture up there? What's the point?

Well, since you didn't ask, I'll tell you. I got this out of Hilltopper '66, page 43. That's me in the middle. Somebody suggests (in a most insightful pun) that I must be pretty self-centered. (Get it? Self Centered.) Sure I am. In truth I could have pushed myself off to one of the edges - and almost did - but that would have meant the loss of some faces I wanted to include. That was our sophomore year.

Straight to the east is Tom Musich, one of the nicer guys I ever got to hang out with at Catholic High. (I felt a minor joy that his bad haircut here would deflect some attention from mine.)I think an uncle had something to do with a local radio station and Tom was into that. I don't know for sure what became of him after graduation. Down south, we've got Ken Pellegrini - another genuinely good person. We got to know each other a bit in grade school at St. Paul's but didn't hang out much at JCHS. If I'm not mistaken, I believe he ended up working for Marquette in Admissions or something - but we haven't had contact since graduation. Next to Ken (southeast) is Joe Petkus. I never really knew him well; he had a reputation for being pretty smart. I'd heard he eventually got accepted into U. of Chicago.

To the northeast is a fellow we'll call "my old buddy Don Meyer". I need the qualifications there because we didn't have much, if anything, to do with each other in high school. Different crowds. He was smart and even got himself elected to something. Way out of my league. But we were thrown together after graduation into that odd group of Carmelite seminarian-type freshmen at Marquette. (I think it was Don who introduced me to the glories of Motown.) We got tight enough that year to be able to travel together the next summer. We visited the (eventually to become) fine poet Charlie Langton in Atlanta and then bounced on to D.C. for quick encounters with the (eventually sadly deceased) wild man and artist Rick Brintzenhof and the enigmatic young (vulgar and fascinating) Alexis Nelson. The next year Don decided, at some point during our Niagara Falls novitiate, that this particular life was not for him. We had some brief occasional contact after that, but then life took us elsewhere. Only much later, in these adult lives we've now got, have we caught up with each other a bit. He's busy living in Hong Kong, getting rich, I hope.

What about those other four guys off to the north and west of me? I don't know. They were faces in the hall, guys filling desks in classes, probably jocks. You decide.

So what's the point? I don't have many fond memories of high school. It was someting to get through while I was trying to figure me out. I look at many of my students over the past few years and see them struggling with the same, different, or worse crap than I had. Sometimes they seem so desperately sad or angry that, if I was a hugger, I'd just give them one and say "You know, it's really going to be okay some day - it really is."

Would this be inauthentic? hopelessly naive? just too gay? Maybe. But I wish somebody could have seen me back then and had the impulse to do it for me. I would have been shocked, would have fled from it; but I also would have smiled and felt better in some small corner of my little self...that somebody noticed.

What happened today in school? The usual great stuff. The freshmen are wrapping up The Odyssey with a bit of writing, and the sophomores wandered into the odd world of Poe with "The Tell-Tale Heart".

Only two more days of collection for the Street Scenes fundraiser. We broke the 100% barrier today on the efforts of only six people. (The vastest majority are living up to their sophmoronic natures by putting it off and putting it off and saying, "We bring it all in on the last day." Yeah, we'll see about that.) Sophomores. Sheesh.

The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness.
John Keats