September means we're close to my favorite time of year. Only a few more weeks of hot weather before the leaves begin to change and fall. Sweatshirt weather. Summer is flying by, and I can't say I'm unhappy to see it go. I haven't felt well for a while now, but I'm praying the worst is over.
The anticipation of the first shades of Autumn have me thinking back to times when the most important thing was the upcoming football game and struggling through Algebra class. I know I always had more on my plate than that, but those are the things I want to remember the most.
Leaving the football game and heading toward the cliffs at the falls for hanging out and laughing at those of us choosing to get drunk and act stupid. We looked out for one another, though. No one ever left drinking and driving no matter how many lies we had to tell parents or where we had to leave parked cars. If we didn't go there, we cruised main street and ended up parking behind an old sewing factory making out in our cars. The area dropped off into a stream, and my boyfriend at the time took great pleasure in grabbing me by my hands and swinging me out over the edge. It scared the shit out of me, but I never once thought he might drop me. He could have dropped me. I was dumb.
I honestly can't believe some of us actually made it to graduation. There were so many of us testing fate every single day. I was in a graduating class that broke records in testing scores, its number of honor students, and teens entering into secondary education. Even our athletes were straight A students. We totally missed out on the class separation of jocks and geeks. We were all brainiacs. We were a smart bunch of little shits, but we were haunted.
We grew up dealing with the bitterness our parents felt toward life. Most of them felt trapped working for logging companies or coal mines. The glass ceiling was hardly above the ground. Especially if you didn't get an education, and most of them didn't. They were suffocated by ridiculous religious conviction that had turned them into angry scared little people. They told us from birth that we had to be better than they'd been, but to get above our raising was an insult to what they'd sacrificed for us in this world. They told us about a life far away from here that we could live if we tried hard enough, but they never really gave us the confidence to believe in ourselves enough to reach it. We were going to end up working in the same dead end jobs and living the same miserably numb lives. Their demons, and the ghosts formed from their could-haves and should-haves followed their children. Did they know?
A small poor southern town. I wasn't the only one working a full time job to help support my family from the time I was sixteen. There were several pregnancies. The smell of pot being smoked on the bus most days was almost unbearabe. If you didn't want to be high before you ever got to school, you had to ride with your head out the window. So many of us drank like fish. There was a guy in my French class who brought vodka in a Mt. Dew bottle to class every single day. I sat behind him and held him by the back of his shirt so that he wouldn't fall out of his seat. I can still name kids who went home to houses without food, to abusive parents, to no real parents at all. I remember names of kids whose parents were so strict and blind to anything and everything around them, they might as well have not been there at all. Girls with eating disorders and boys with steroid addictions. For a small southern town, we could have been a hit teen tv drama all on our own.
Every once in a while I'll run into someone from my class, and we'll hug and exchange pleasantries. We part ways with smiles and goodbyes. We never talk about the ghosts because if we do, maybe they'll come back. And if they come back, will they haunt our children? It's a chance we can't take.
