That's right, it's memory time again. As I said last Friday, I'll now make my last entry of each week a remembrance of my own that somehow pertains to school or my former life as a student or what have you.
Capiche? Cool.
Today I turn to a page from elementary school, fifth grade to be exact, and a class trip to an environmental camp called Sly Park. Going there was a rite of passage for fifth and sixth-graders among schools in our area, a trip made every fall and the source of pre-arrival jitters based mostly on the long passed-down rumor that among the required activities at Sly Park was eating a live worm.
As it turned out, the proffered worm was in fact an optional snack, but anyone who successfully swallowed one got a special T-shirt bearing one of the slimy guys in the formation of a lightning bolt, with "SLY PARK" spelled out in big block letters through its center. Needless to say, and perhaps foretelling of the timid palate I retain to this day, I declined the nightcrawler and was perfectly satisifed with the butterfly-adorned shirt reserved for unadventurous epicureans like me.
So in fifth grade, I'll just come right out and tell you, I was a total tomboy. We are talking Tuffskins and sneakers and the occasional football jersey (Los Angeles Rams - old school!); baseball hats, pocket knives, dirt bikes, et al. My BFF at the time was this kid Joey, with whom I would regularly ride said dirt bikes and play by the creek, collecting polliwogs and crawdads and sometimes small frogs (we'd get them all in a bucket with water, stare for a while then toss them back) and poking mud with sticks, because somehow poking mud with sticks is fun when you're in fifth grade. Go figure.
At some point, I guess because we got along really well and he was a boy and I a girl and maybe because it just seemed like what we were supposed to do, Joey asked me to "go" with him, as in go steady, as in boyfriend-girlfriend stuff, people. Actually his friend Aaron asked on Joey's behalf, instructing me, if my answer was yes, to stand in the center of my driveway after school one day and just wait. I did, and soon enough Joey rode up on his bike, stopping long enough to kiss me (to be precise, he licked my face as my lips remained locked up like the Hello Kitty diary I kept next to my bed) then simply ride away again.
We never spoke of that incident and our friendship proceeded as it always had, except that we were now "going," which didn't seem to be much more than something to tell people and pretend like it made us somehow cooler.
Now back to Sly Park. Like I said, I was a tomboy, and as I think I told you last week I was also, at this age, pretty painfully shy. So being stuck in a cabin with, A) a bunch of girls when all your friends are boys and B) a bunch of girls you don't know very well when you're shy was pretty much, well, torturous, and I recall counting off the days in my head and desperately wanting the week to end.
About halfway through the trip, Aaron -- friend of Joey and I, same Aaron who asked me to go with Joey -- made a similar unexpected approach, finding me outside the girls' cabin as I made my way to the dining hall, walking beside a camp counselor since I was too shy to befriend anyone else. So he comes up and says, "Joey isn't going with you anymore. He's going with Sunny now."
Shocked and dismayed -- as much as a fifth grader can be shocked and dismayed at the loss of something she never even knew the meaning of, which is to say, A LOT -- I asked him why.
"Because she's prettier than you."
Ouch.
I thereafter began counting down the minutes until we returned home and every second until we boarded the bus I felt smaller and shyer (or is it shier? more shy? I'm having a vocabulary lapse, which I'm allowed at 5 p.m. Friday, right?) than I ever had before. Bottom line: It totally sucked.
After a temporary rift -- i.e., two days of not speaking and looking at each other awkwardly -- Joey and I were able to resume our friendship. It helped that Sunny dumped him the day we returned from camp for a fourth grader (a younger man, egads!), I believe his name was Cobe, who, she told Joey, "is cuter than you."
The moral of the story: Even fifth graders have karma issues.
Postscript: The very next year, Sunny and her girlie crew, for whatever reason I never actually knew, decided to take me under their wing and make me their "project," and it wasn't long before I'd tossed out the Tuffskins and was shopping at the Esprit outlet in San Francisco, wearing blue eyeshadow and pegging my pants, begging to have my ears pierced and, having miraculously been coaxed out of my shell and into an actual social circle for the first time, was hosting parties wherein we'd all link arms and dance Rockettes style to "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun."
What a difference 12 months makes. Take heart, shy kids. Take heart.
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