In 1974, when I graduated from high school and looked nervously at the future, I didn’t get much further than anxiety about university. I wasn’t one of those who burst out of the gates of the schoolyard. I found myself beset by fears.
I’d loved my bog-standard public high school. I’d felt safe there. Like I belonged.
And when it came time to leave, I felt cast out. I no longer care how “successful” my school fellows may be. I’m more interested in who they are now, how they have lived, and what they have learnt.
Credit: ISTOCK A year later, I returned to the buildings and playgrounds of Forest High – I can no longer remember why – expecting to feel that I’d come home. But while the buildings were familiar, it was as if everyone I remembered had been replaced by a complete set of strangers. They couldn’t have been, but that’s how it felt to 18-year-old me.
I no longer belonged. It was not my school any more. It was my first lesson about how the hole you leave when you depart from any stage in life closes almost immediately.
Schools, university, jobs, neighbourhoods and projects are always more important to you than you are to them. Learning this was a good thing. There is nothing sadder than those who cling tenaciously to the old schoolyard.
I was 17 when I left high school. I am 67 now – that’s 50 years of different places, people, jobs, friends, highlights and lowlights. My school prepared me well for them, but by 1974 its usefulness was over.
Time.
