(insert lyrics from the school song here)

On a Saturday morning in April, I paid a visit to my old high school for the first time in several years. I'd been out the night before at Jay's birthday party, which was full of SME grads from several different years, and after finding out a number of the 40-something ladies at work also went to East, it was starting to look like my future would be made up of an increasingly insulated circle of former Lancers.

In my hungover state, with Jenn driving the car to SME for the school's Earth Day celebration, it felt like I was being forcibly taken back to high school and the last 8 years had just been a game.

The reason I was going back was for the library book sale fundraiser, which my mom had told me about. Because the place was so busy, we had to park in the Sophomore Lot, home of countless after-school showdowns. In the Spirit Circle a bus named "The Magic Bus" contained a bunch of smaller children working on craft projects. As tempting as it was to hop on for the ride, the school itself would prove to be as time-unwinding as any magic bus could hope to be.

When we got there we realized Earth Day Fair was much larger than just the book sale. There was a health food lunch set up and the gym was full of booths selling organic plants and stuff like that. There were some parrots and things in the back of the gym and a number of craft workshops for kids.

I bought a huge stack of dollar books, including a collection of essays by Hesse, some young adult fiction, a star chart, a travelogue by someone named Betty Wetzel called "After You, Mark Twain: A Modern Journey Around the Equator," and a World War II history book in which someone had added silly and mostly illegible captions to the stern black-and-white wartime portraits.

[side note: visiting a used book sale when hungover can be dangerous because you feel like if you don't buy and read these out-of-circulation books than you're the one responsible for letting their subjects and authors fall into eternal obscurity]

After buying the books, making "Save The Earth" buttons and talking to my sisters (both current SME students), we stopped by the band room to play with the animals that the environmental ed students were keeping an eye on. I watched some little kids interact with a skittish little chinchilla and marveled at how neat it was that East basically has its own mini-zoo.

Walking further down the hallway, past the stairs to the locker room and the little theater was like unzipping a compressed file in my memory. The experiences and emotions of a decade ago came back into focus, and I could picture my classmates and I going about our daily high school lives.

On the ramp beside the cafeteria, I looked out into the courtyard, which looked like it has a few new picnic tables and benches. I could easily picture the group of friends I used to eat lunch. The funny thing was I half expected to see everyone there, laughing, hacky-sacking and/or throwing food at one another.

While cruising through the halls, it dawned on me that sophomore and junior year in high school were when my current life really began. That was when I first started staying up late, filling up notebooks with awkward but honest lines of verse, drinking Coca Cola early in the morning, driving around with friends, writing for the school paper, filming comedy skits with friends and drinking beer. By the time I graduated, the template for my lifestyle thus far was pretty much in place.
East is also where I got developed a more diverse taste in music, thanks to some friends of mine in the jazz band whom I joined to form the seminal high school funk group Funk in the Trunk. Sometimes people are surprised to learn that I haven't regularly played in a band since high school, but after winning B.O.B. with F.I.T.T. as a sophomore, I thought it would be futile to try and top that experience.

Thinking about my own high school days made me think about all the amazing people who have passed through the halls of SME. We may have had a reputation as a priveleged, sheltered school, but most of us seemed to be aware of it on some level and did our best to step outside of the bubble whenever we could and as soon as we could. The teaching staff -- no doubt as a result of dealing with the kinds of parents and administrators you get in a district like Shawnee Mission -- did a good job of instilling us with healthy bit of skepticism, and it always seemed like there was a bit of a subversive spirit alive in both the faculty and student body.

I'm always interested to hear about what my former classmates are up to now. I've seen friends from high school live in other countries, get involved in political campaigns, become teachers, scientists and parents. I've also seen people drop out, mess up and find their way again.

So, former classmates, I'm happy to have known you. I'm proud of you guys and I wish you the best, wherever you may be. Now I better end this speech and bid you all good night before I wind up quoting the school song.

ADDENDUM

For Further Reading...
My friends and I fancied ourselves quite the satirists when we were at East, but former biology teacher Rick Gould has literally written the book on the subject. "The Leaping Tuna of Kirschenbaum East" follows the trials of principal Alexander Papadopoulus and staff, with each of the 180 (short) chapters representing a day in the school year. I ran into Mr. Gould recently and he said he put the book together using the hundreds of humorous staff memos he'd written over the years. I'm only a couple weeks into it, but so far it's fantastic. You can find it on Amazon. And don't be daunted by the page length -- each chapter is just a few pages and there's a lot of blank ones in between.

Class of 99 Reunion Info... Following the suggestion of another former classmate, I proposed to the reunion committee that we hold the 10-year get-together at the McDonald's on 95th and Mission where we could loiter, smoke cigs and then go to Rock'n'Bowl at Ranch Mart. Though the idea was a popular one, I'm guessing the actual location will be held in a slightly more traditional venue. Either way, it should be a good time. I'll keep you posted.