“Then when you graduate
You take a look around and you say “Hey wait!”
This is the same as where I just came from
I thought it was over, aw that’s just great.
…
Seen it all before
I want my money back!”
-Bowling for Soup, “High School Never Ends”

Early in our senior year of high school, my friends and I designed a T-shirt as part of the contest to design the official class shirt for the Class of ‘98. We were not the “in” crowd; we were the guys who played chess in the commons. In the style of a popular series of T-shirts of the day, our design submission theme was “Co-Ed Naked Albuquerque Academy: We Have to Pay for It”.

It is thus not surprising, perhaps, that I am just hours from paying $35 for appetizers and access to a cash bar with a collection of my high school classmates.

The T-shirts never got printed. Not because our design didn’t win the contest, but because the Academy wouldn’t allow such a controversial design to carry the noble school’s official sanction. We actually won the contest vote twice – first in a primary landslide, and then in a secondary run-off with the Academy faculty making it very clear that our design was still eligible to win, but would not be printed or sold by the school if it did win. It won anyway, and no one got a class shirt that year because we didn’t want to finance our lark of a design.

I often describe Albuquerque Academy as a school in the middle of the West trying desperately hard to be an elite New England prep school, without the boarding and the uniforms. There is no dearth of ridiculous description of the Academy – we called the cafeteria a “dining hall” and had assigned seating with ten students and a faculty “table head” (to facilitate appropriate mealtime discussion) per table, plus assigned student “waiters” on a half-quarterly rotating basis who brought out the family style meals. We were dominant in every realm of pretension and pomposity, garnering sour looks from any non-Academites who we gulpingly admitted our alma mater to. My time at the Academy was single-handedly responsible for my flat refusal to apply to any Ivy League colleges, weary as I was of wealth, class, and elitism.

And yet my years at the Academy were predominantly fabulous. I made most of my most enduring lifelong friends there. I learned how to debate. I wrote and read and even felt academically challenged once in a while. I started dating. I became a vegetarian, started growing my hair out, became outspoken and dramatic. I spent five years there, a personal record by more than double at a single school to that point. I attended until the end of the prescribed term, a first in fifteen years of attending educational institutions.

There were horrors there too. One in particular comes to mind, but there were others. The antagonism that only adolescents can offer other human beings. Unmotivated teachers whose only offered challenge was to see how much one could get away with on their watch. Ultimate frisbee.

Tonight, I revisit ten years of history, or really sixteen since that day in August 1993 when I was one of two new kids in an eighth-grade class pushing 150 students. My parents, full of hope that I had finally found an academic home, exchanged looks of grave concern as I broke out into open weeping in the restaurant where we dined after they picked me up. Sobbing in the aftermath, I wasn’t sure that I could face returning for even a second day to this foreboding brick wall of insular classism.

I wish I could tell that near-hyperventilating young man about the ten-year reunion he would voluntarily attend 193 months thereafter.

The question seems to have arisen of late as to why I am going. My parents took it for granted that I would go; most others assumed just as strongly that I would not. Far too much of my willingness to attend hinged on the prisoner’s-dilemma reservation tracking website and how a few particular battleships navigated the seas of Yes, Maybe, and No. An early perception that many of my old crew, my lifelong friends, would be attending was erased after I had locked in a ticket. In the end, there were too many people I wanted to see to pass up the chance. It was really as simple as that.

Then, with some of my friends dropping out in every direction, Emily and I saw the film “American Teen”. While not the most brilliant movie of any kind, it captured most viscerally and profoundly the essence of being high-school aged in America in my generation. While I admittedly didn’t recognize the abundant text-messaging from my own days, everything else was the same. The raw emotional force of each day, each interaction, each second of life, unmatched before or since, is so well portrayed in this movie that it actually makes one feel 17 upon exit. When one comes to one’s senses, the only remaining feeling is a crisp, pristine relief that one is not only not 17, but never has to live through being so again in this lifetime.

Thus, I’m still riding out the excitement of that movie, of a handful of people about whom I am genuinely interested and curious (yes, both), of a few long-term friends who it will be good to see in our old hometown outside of winter. I feel certain that I will have changed less than almost anyone. I still think of myself as approximately 20… and now I even look like I did back then (perhaps with longer hair). I’m sure at least one person will call me out for having stayed in the United States despite promising my junior year history class that I would leave in disgust shortly after graduating college. I’m sure at least one person will ask me where the old ‘51 Buick is. I’m sure at least one person will fail to believe that I still don’t drink, do drugs, or eat meat.

I’ll see you out there soon. I’ll be the one in the Mariners jacket.