After two years of pondering it, I am ready to write about seventh grade. It has felt pivotal in my life for a long time, and it has taken a lot of thought to put it into words. But first, all the preliminaries...
I have worked one-on-one, intimately, with many middle schoolers in the last couple decades, and I can confidently say that in contemporary American culture, the middle school years are, on average, one of the toughest seasons in life for those subjected to them. I'm sure that many of my readers have memories of the discomforts of those years, too, so my story is not exactly atypical. My dad, however, seems to have spent some of the happiest years of his life in junior high. On the whole, that is not my story to tell, but the memories and expectations from his youth provide a reasonably important backdrop to my own story...
My dad's middle school years were spent in a wildly growing, ethnically and economically homogeneous suburban Houston neighborhood, riding the crest of the Baby Boom. The sun was shining, new housing developments were going up left and right, kids rode their bikes everywhere, and the junior high (grades 7 to 9) housed a whopping 3000 young and beautiful bodies in motion. The powers-that-be bussed these enthusiastic, energetic young people to the Thursday football games, and put a cheerleader on each bus to lead the chants. These were the years of freedom and fun. It was thrilling, visceral youth at its best, complete with crooning pop music which still runs down the backbone of my dad's psyche. Church youth group, too, was booming, and my dad holds fond memories. All of it seems to have engendered a heady feeling of "groupiness", of being part of something....
My own neighborhood elementary in a quiet, suburban loop of Austin was small, around 350 students in grades K through 6. I attended in parts of 2nd, 3rd, and 5th grades, as well as all of 4th. Seventh grade meant bussing to an integrated, large school on the economically-disadvantaged east side the interstate. I did not attend Martin Junior High. My school career was more hodge-podge....
Sixth grade at church meant leaving the thought-provoking, hands-on 4th and 5th grade Sunday school class I loved (taught by a man who was an archeologist by profession) and moving to the middle school class. This had a rotating cast of teachers, lounge furniture, edgy paint on the walls, and more presumed discussion of edgier topics. This was quietly upsetting to me, and I felt really out of place. At lunch with friends at Wendy's after the first morning of this uncomfortable change, my father announced to the table with great pride and wistfulness that later that afternoon, I would be attending youth group for the first time. I couldn't see it them, but I can now, that he was remembering all the fun and groupiness of his own youth group years. While I did have some fun over the years and a couple of good friends in church youth group, I was never in the middle, and I did not enjoy a feeling of groupiness. I was not ready for this arbitrarily-timed plunge into the world of growing up; I was a small, skinny, angular, tender 11-year-old. I wished very much that I could not join the youth group....
In February of sixth grade, I left the latest home education stint for Kirby Hall, a school which wanted to be more pretentious than it was. Housed in a former private U.T. dormitory, its exterior classic architecture cut a fine form. In sixth grade we were part of the Lower School, and I particularly loved our reading, grammar, and world history classes with the articulate, precise, and tough woman who taught those three on the second floor.
I continued at Kirby Hall in seventh grade, where more or less the same cast of students moved to the third floor, to the Upper School. Upper schoolers had more freedom, and one of those freedoms was the option to eat lunch wherever we wanted. The old dormitory kitchen had been remade into the science lab, but the dining room was still just that. On the first day of 7th grade, the boys gathered around one of the round tables, and the girls eagerly gathered around another. Except for Sandy, Susan, and me (*names changed). We sort of bandied about without direction and ended up on the front, tiled, roofed portico in a quiet corner. There was a small, round, metal table, the kind that has holes and plant designs, like in a garden. And there was a small garden planted just off that end of the portico, with a little pond. It was quiet and private, and the most fascinating part of that garden was a tropical banana tree, hanging to life in the semi-arid, not-quite-subtropical, continental climate. This little spot became an oasis for the three of us who didn't really fit into the group. My memories of seventh grade weave around but always return to this spot.
Susan was precisely one year older than me to the day, which meant she was actually a teenager in 7th grade. At least a head taller than me, she was also stocky and plump and very curvy with thing, stringy, waist-length, light brown hair. She was always dressed in an extra-large T-shirt and leggings with a fanny pack, in a time when jeans were the standard American leg wear. Her big time sink in life was karate, in which she was a black belt, and she spent most evenings at the dojo with other martial artists, mostly adults. She never demonstrated for us, but I am sure she was the right friend to take on an adventure which involved dark alleys. She did most of the talking.
Sandy was even taller than Susan, maybe 6 foot already but narrow, and nine months older than me. She had pale skin and bright red hair that formed tight, afro-type curls, which meant her hair could never be "long" and would only grow wider and taller. She was very private, quiet, unassuming, and fiercely intelligent and could, like Susan, be mistaken for someone much older. In 6th grade she had written a horror short story which the teacher read aloud to the class, and the conception and execution were such, it seemed to me entirely publishable. (A few years later she started college early, eventually earning several degrees, spent many years in academic research in the UK, and is now a museum curater at an Ivy League school.)
I was average height, scrawny, and felt a child in an adolescent world. I had music and ballet which were my intense loves, but I was also busy researching linguistics and inventing my backyard country with its own language and pre-Industrial culture. I was also reading the diary of Anne Frank obsessively (i.e. daily for a year or two), and had my head wrapped up in Judaism and the trials of Jews in the Third Reich. I couldn't sit "normally" in class, alway quietly fidgeting, squatting on my chair, sitting on my feet, doodling. My temperature regulation was abysmal then and into my twenties, exacerbated by lack of sleep (I was an incurable night owl in an industrial early-bird world) and frequent respiratory illnesses. I was freezing if the temperature was under 80 degrees, and much of my squirming was directed toward trying to warm parts of my icy extremities. I did not know how to be "in" the group - usually when I tried to say something funny to be accepted it fell flat - my stories or exclaimations were "too much", "not enough" or "not of general interest" Though Sandy and Susan were happy to hear about my interests, the general seventh grade was not ready for that yet. More than once I showed up to lunch with a notebook, working on creating a glossary for my invented language or translating a picture book.
I took careful mental notes on what kids wore, so I could wear the same. T-shirt, jeans, sneakers; that was the uniform. My mother, of course, having more of an eye for fashion sometimes sent me to school wearing better-looking get ups. Once I was sent in wearing salmon-colored leggings with an artistic design printed on them, a crisp, white, flowing, sleeveless A-line tunic with flowers embroidered around the buttonholes, and brown booties. One of the T-shirt/jeans/sneakers-clad classmates complimented the ensemble highly (probably wishing she, too, could be so fashionable), but all I could think was how physically uncomfortable the unfamiliar fabrics and drapes felt, and I was quietly miserable, counting the hours until I could change back into the comfortable familiar.
I was fascinated by our science class. John DeMos was passionate about evolutionary biology, specializing in the animal kingdom. Though I had trouble applying myself to memorizing the names and numbers of processes and technical terms, I was caught up in the grand sweep of meaning, and this affinity has bonded me in later years to some of the writings of Madelaine l'Engle.
We went on a class field trip in the Spring of that year to a place I already loved. We went to Prude Ranch in west Texas and stayed three nights. It was a seven-hour drive out to the wild high desert places with an ancient volcanic history and atmosphere of the eternal. My dad was a chaperone. He drove our aging blue minivan. Sandy and Susan and I sat in the back row. The middle row was stuffed with luggage - ours, plus other luggage which did not fit into the cars brimming with the more social members of the class. I was sandwiched in the middle seat between my two much larger friends. At some point, one of them pulled out Jolly Ranchers to share, and we sucked on several serially - some were the giant long ones. The three of us had gotten bored on this long journey, and at some point, the two larger ones had taken to poking and tickling and trying to annoy the smaller one. I was certainly reactive, so despite my complete discomfort, they were probably having fun. At some point I took the cover off a sleeping bag and stuffed it over my head to mute the torment, and I got stuck in there. Plus the giant watermelong jolly rancher had glued my jaws together on the right side. Eventually my dad was made to realize I wasn't just being silly back there, and he pulled off to extract me from the hood in which I was semi-panicked. The rest of the trip remains a bit hazy, but I remember enjoying it on the whole, though not as much as when my family went alone and there was more quiet space to just be and to observe.
When it was too cold or wet at school, Susan, Sandy, and I would join the other girls in the dining room for lunch. There was one important thing that we could all get behind. The folks who brought in the hot lunch for purchase (I only bought lunch on the Fridays my parents would give me money for pizza), had candy bars for purchase. I had one favorite. The King sized Crunch bar. It was chocolate, so that was good, but more than that, it had crisped rice inside for a satisfying crunch. As many days a week as I could come up with the $1.50 for that giant piece of junk food, I did. I am sure that frequent consumption of this volume of sugar and cocoa did nothing to improve my terrible sleep or awful thermoregulation. This was something the whole table to girls did, too. When it came to Crunch bars, I was part of the "in group."
I was generally a poor student in terms of careful application to improving myself. However, my natural abilities allowed me to keep pretty much straight A's, so I did not worry about it. I did the required homework we were to hand it, but rarely finished the required reading or studying. However, topics, in or out of school, which caught my interest, I would delve into with great focus as long as the spark lasted. In certain ways my own self-education put me far ahead of many of my peers. My personal quirks put me off to the side. It was the freedom of seventh grade that allowed us to choose sides, so to speak, and that was when it really sank in that I was on the outside.
Usually I am in my head, and I feel all the things and notice all the things and think all the things. And sometimes when I am in a slightly uncomfortable situation, I see myself from the outside, from slightly behind and above. I see myself physically moving differently from the group, saying things differently, valuing things differently. I see a weird, awkward being, so full of life, who sees the weird and awkward and can't turn it off. I don't know how close that third -person observer is to reality, and perhaps reality is more subjective than we imagine. Each person has their own perceptions and those perceptions interact with each other to create multidimensional strands, woven through time...
Eighth grade was another home-based education stint, so seventh grade at Kirby Hall was the extent of my middle school experience. It was quite nice in its own way, and I have recently wondered if I would have been happier or or completely miserable at a large public school. I am leaning toward the latter.
