And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.
Last Saturday, I walked through the doors of the high school from which I graduated way back in 1978. I was ushered in by the rustling leaf sound of pom poms as a row of uniform-clad girls shouted out a “Welcome back!”
How weird was that. I’ve never been pom-pommed. I was never involved in sports.
Waukesha North High School celebrated its 50th anniversary last weekend. My class, the class of 1978, was the first class to attend all four years there. Personally, I didn’t – I didn’t arrive at Waukesha North until second semester of my junior year. It was my third high school. But, as I told the crowd assembled for the event, it wasn’t long before Waukesha North made me feel like I’d come home.
I went to a lot of schools. I attended kindergarten in Berkeley, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. First through fifth grade, I was in way northern Minnesota, living in Esko, between Duluth and Cloquet. Sixth through tenth grades, I attended junior high and high school in Stoughton, Wisconsin. First semester junior year, I was at Cedarburg High School, in Cedarburg, Wisconsin.
And then Waukesha North until I graduated. Of all the schools I attended, I was at Waukesha North for the second-shortest amount of time (Cedarburg was just one semester). But it’s the school I call my own.
I was asked to attend the anniversary event because I was inducted into Waukesha North’s Wall of Stars in 2020. According to the school website, to be on the Wall of Stars, you “must have demonstrated citizenship during and after high school, and must have made a significant contribution to the community and society.” I can’t tell you how proud I was to be included, both in the Wall of Stars and to be asked to participate in the anniversary event. As a gift, I donated a copy of each of my books for the school library (it remains to be seen if they’ll actually go there – they have to go in front of the District for approval, which is very different from the school when I was a student there). And I had to speak, talking about what Waukesha North meant to me.
So I did.
When I arrived at Waukesha North that second semester junior year, I was a very angry, very sad student. My school experience, and my life experience, kindergarten through first semester junior year, was not good. I just wanted to escape. I was already escaping through writing, losing myself in my own stories. When I wasn’t writing, I was reading. When I was in the first grade, in an elementary school that was separate from the junior high and high school, my teacher received permission to drive me to the high school during lunch hour once a week, so she could find books that were appropriate for me topic-wise, but written at a level that would challenge me.
Words were a lifesaver. By the time I got to Waukesha North, it seemed like there was very little else in life that was worthwhile.
But then I went in to register for classes. I walked out of that building, that same building I walked into on Saturday, clutching my list of classes and feeling excited about school for the first time in years. By the time I graduated, I took creative writing, journalism, Mystery & The Macabre, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Growing Up In Literature And Reality, and I worked on the school’s creative writing magazine (a creative writing magazine!) and newspaper. The books I read for class! The Catcher In The Rye, Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack, Wanda Hickey’s Night Of Golden Memories, Death Be Not Proud, The Pill Versus The Spring Hill Mine Disaster, On The Road, Howl. Gritty, beautifully written books, all part of the actual curriculum, that laid the groundwork for my own development and future as a writer.
As I stood in that Waukesha North gym last Saturday, a place where I never took class because I’d already fulfilled the gym requirement in other schools, I felt amazingly lucky. I was lucky to have arrived at Waukesha North when I did. I honestly don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t had that experience. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be here today.
But I was also lucky to attend school when I did, at a time when literature was accepted as a valuable learning experience for students. Not just the classics, but books that spoke of the current experience, the lives that students were living, the real world, and did so in such a realistic, but positive way, that the reader couldn’t help but feel a connection and also feel hope for a future. The books I was exposed to, and read voraciously, could have been about me. And they showed me that these characters turned out okay. Life was worth living.
And you know what? I turned out okay too.
I said on Saturday that Waukesha North High School saved my life. And it did.
I hope that legacy lives on and on and on. I am hoping this Moment of Happiness grows into a second Moment of Happiness, when my books are placed on a shelf in the school library, and I return to see them there.
And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.
