Christmas Icons Part Five: "In Love At Christmas" Series
HIGH SCHOOL
High School affords a wealth of opportunity. Not only are girls present, they are required by law to sit next to you, in shifts which rotate your potential love matches by the hour. Not only that, but the extracurricular activities provide sanctioned events where you can watch girls play or perform in front of you, and you can likewise display yourself at events they are required to watch. As if that were not enough, there are regular vacation periods, especially summer, where you are given three months of starvation from female contact, only to be rejoined with the group after they have grown noticeably more feminine and have reworked their wardrobes, in increasingly distracting choices.
There is a downside to high school, and it consists mainly of life's frequently repeated enigma: the best parts are also the worst parts. For one thing, it is wonderful that State and Federal laws require hundreds of girls to spend a minimum of one hundred eighty days per year with you. Accompanying these same laws, however, is the requirement that every single male competitor in the area be gathered at the same time and place. Some may compare it with a Serengeti watering hole, but the Serengeti is open to all ages. High School is restricted to the youth, made up entirely of men and women in the earliest stages of their prime, herded by a handful of aging teachers. (This is not counting the special case of the twenty-two year old art teacher, Miss W--, who by 1972 still retained many wonderful wardrobe habits from her late sixties college experience, but that is another story.)
Regarding Christmas, the same, good-news-bad-news problem rises to frightening proportions. There are glorious opportunities for a young man. With a very small bunch of green leaves and white berries, wrapped with a simple red bow, he is not only allowed, but encouraged to run around kissing girls, who are expected to indulge him, regardless of their usual social status. A lowly band member just might be able to kiss a cheerleader, even a varsity cheerleader, if he can muster the nerve. The down side of mistletoe is that football players, track stars, and that leather jacketed guy with dead eyes do not recognize the good-natured tradition of sharing a girlfriend's soft and glossy lips with hopeful nerds. It is true that, after a beating, the authorities will judge in favor of the bearer of the medieval aphrodisiac, but it is also true that the eagle eyes of the Vice-Principle do not perceive the hidden little cubby between the Auditorium and the Metal Shop, and his legal reach does not extend to the empty car lot between the crosswalk and the entrance to the Junior High Building, where the angry boyfriend will be happy to invite you for a couple of rounds of that familiar old game, "Which hand am I going to hit you with next?"
In this country, high school is a four year experience, containing exactly four chances for a magical Christmas, and exactly four chances of going down in a fiery defeat. It is the mostly systematically arranged opportunity for you to rise to the occasion and suavely display your sensitive, romantic heart. If you were thirty years old in high school, you would groom yourself, wear leather shoes and offer a beautifully wrapped gift, made from precious metals, jewels, and the rarest perfumed oils, to that cute girl who actually likes literature class, runs track, and thinks of her mom as a close friend. But, such as it is, high school comes and goes long before Jane Austin makes more sense than Stephen King. Instead of kissing your ski-club buddy on the ski lift as delicate snowflakes swirl around, you let the vampire with thick smudges of blue or green eye shadow lead you by the hand while warming up in someone's basement after the toboggan party. Although she has not written any of her own lab reports in Chemistry, she uses an entire bottle of Eau de Brothel every week, and she is more likely to be found playing in seniors' cars than Led Zeppelin, she is a widely approved object of desire, and high school is too seldom a time when men are individuals.
So, you start off, an ignorant Freshman, enamored of the seniors girls, so much like mature women to your fourteen year old eyes, you do not notice the second chair French Horn player in the wool skirt with knee socks. Too bad, since you blow the first of four high school Christmas opportunities on some unrequited fantasy. As a Sophomore, you make a feeble move on the cheerleader who lets you write all of the lab reports in Chemistry, but that is the year you find out the hard way what the difference is between an eighteen year old, weight-lifting pole vaulter's punch and your fifteen year old, sandwich-lifting trumpet player's defense. You do not notice the thin girl in History class who likes to dance. You become a Junior, but the girl you really think about is steady with the quarterback. Christmas comes and goes, and you don't feel like trying this time around. You should know that the Freshman are only two years younger than you, that this difference will mean nothing when you are in your forties, but you do not understand this, or the more general fact that for the rest of your life, a younger partner is far from a stigma.
As a Senior, you rule! Filled with new found confidence and swagger, you circle the brunette that liked you two years ago in Biology, but something dreadful is in the air. She's already mentally planning her way of life at the State College in Big Rapids, while you are already committed to a college in Maryland, as in "the State of Maryland." It's not just her; you find that your plans for the future, while lauded by the faculty, have a weird effect on the female population. How many times do they tell you this year, "If you had only approached me a year or two ago…!" You have the creeping feeling that your high school years are over before they're over. Looking around, the only peers who are really dating are the ones who have been together for a while, or the ones who are dating older guys in college. Way too late you cast your glance toward the Freshman, but they all see the invisible sign on your chest that says, "Gone by the Middle of Summer," and scurry away before you launch a conversation. (It's also hard to be nonchalant when most of the Freshmen girls have most of their classes in a section of the school you haven't visited since before you had a driving license.)
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