this is going to sound crazy, i know, but right now my office smells like my high school cafeteria. do you ever smell something—even something completely strange and random—and bam! you're right back to a really specific time and place in your life? and you let your mind just roll around in it a while? just for kicks?
well, that's where i am now. my high school cafeteria. the smell is obviously food-related: faintly greasy, a strange hint of soft pretzel (yes, they have a very specific scent) and... condiments. yep, condiments. i remember certain days i would get the chicken patty sandwich (sounds so appetizing, doesn't it?) and there were pathetic, limp pickle slices mashed between the chicken patty and the roll. of course i ate them, i ate the whole thing, after i squirted a sufficient amount of ketchup in all the right places.
anyway, i can smell those pickles right now. and it's making me wistful. i know i've said here before how much i loved high school. some memories i think of as warm blankets that you cuddle up in when you're chilly or not feeling well or down in the dumps. high school is, go figure, one of my blankets. i can easily get lost in reveries of my AP English classes with Miss Fagan; how Mr. G would make delinquent boys shave any visible facial hair with a disposable razor—and no water or shaving cream; how we always had to sell candy bars each autumn, but i tended to just throw a $20 in the envelope and eat them all myself; how Mr. Donahue made us say the Serenity Prayer every day before Theology class (it only dawned on me later that perhaps he'd done some time in AA); all those weeknight and Sunday afternoon play rehearsals that i lived for, the way i'm sure so many of my friends lived for parties.
i just said to Michael the other day that i seemed to be getting through this back-to-school season without getting my annual itch to become a teacher, or an urge to buy a lot of new pencils and notebooks and, what the hell, a funky lunch box too. perhaps that's not so true. perhaps i'll always want to go back to school when the summer starts winding down. i mean, really, you spend how many years of your life in that same school-summer-school-summer cycle, it must take more than nine years to get over it, right?
right?
mb
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