Memory Lane, With A Few Potholes

This morning, in a post on my Facebook timeline, my friend Mary asked me where I went to school in 7th and 8th grades. This kicked off a cascade of memories of that era, and curiosity about why she might have asked.

The 1965-66 school year was a very strange one. My class was near the peak of the baby boom squeezing through the school system. While "they" worked on building the new MacArthur Junior High, my class was shuttled to a block of barracks in Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters of the second Army. "They" called these barracks MacArthur Junior High  That year was remarkable for a couple of reasons. First, it meant that we were not the newbies coming into Arundel Junior High - which was 0.2 miles from my house. We were the only grade in the barracks, so there were no bigger kids to pick on us. Second, we were out of school for a whole week in February due to the Blizzard of '66, which dumped three feet of snow on us. And third, I developed my first serious crush on the girl sitting in front of me in our primary classroom. When the mean girls got an inkling of my feelings, they told her that I liked her. She whipped around and said "HA!!!" in my face. This was the spark that ignited eleven years of clinical depression.

The 1966-67 school year was in Arundel Junior High. MacArthur was finished, so there was room enough for 7th grade to return to Arundel as well, so my class was not the newbies again. My favorite subject was Physical Science, which kicked off my lifelong love affair with physics. I became pretty close to the teacher, Miss Bell. I often stayed after school to help her tidy up and prepare for the next day. The other side of the coin was Art class. The teacher is the one I thought of when I read about Professor Snape in the Harry Potter books. Several times during the year he took whatever I was working on up to the front of the class to show them an example of what NOT to do. The last time he did that, when he returned my sculpture to me, I grabbed a hammer and a chisel and began pounding it to dust, sobbing uncontrollably all the while. My mother was called, and within a week or so, I was seeing a psychiatrist. A "depressive reaction" was the diagnosis of my art class meltdown.

Ninth grade brought on my second serious crush, this time on an eighth grader whose family were the current occupants of the Army officers' off-base rental house next door to mine.  That goofy obsession dragged on for seven goofy years. Also, I was heavily into photography and photo-processing by then. I became known for taking pictures in school one day, and bringing the prints in to show everyone the next day. I was invited to be a photographer on the yearbook staff at Arundel High the following year. I was also looking forward to being on the Arundel Wildcats football team.  So, at the end of the school year, we went on a 5-week vacation to Vero Beach, Florida, where my mother's mother lived.. After our return to Maryland, my parents decided to move us to Vero Beach, The end of my first incarnation.

Needless to say, I have often wondered about some of the people I went to school with back then, but none have surfaced in over 50 years. Has Mary encountered one of them?