I ran into an old schoolmate while boxing day shopping. Matthew had been in my grade six class. He remembered me after I told him my name and when he told me his full name I certainly remembered him. It seems like his most vivid memory of me was me kicking him in the back at a schoolmate's birthday party. In retrospect, I was probably invited because the host felt bad for leaving me out as the only grade six student in the class that wouldn't be invited.
It was the first full year of schooling which I had attended since returning to Edmonton from Tripoli, Libya. It was a new school and there weren't enough grade sixers so that we could have our own class and we shared our class with some grade fives. Matthew and I were two of three grade six boys in this class, the third being Roger whom I ended up kicking in the stomach in grade seven for a reason which I am sure was "good" at the time but I can now no longer recall.
The birthday party was one of a very limited number of social events hosted by people my age for which I was invited. I think that I had trouble fitting in with my peers most of my life but this lack of social temperament became most apparently after my years overseas in grades three through five, inclusive. Up until grade seven I never spent more than two years at a time in the same school. In Edmonton, we live on an acreage where there were no children to interact with. In Libya, I attended an international school for grade three which educated students from an almost limitless list of countries. For grade four, I was enrolled in a British private school. For almost all of grade five I was homeschooled. Upon my return to Canada I felt that my peers had lived in a fish bowl and, for the most part, I refused to fit in and associate with these people. And when I finally did want to fit in, I never could. Until recently, almost all of my friends were double my age.
Anyhow, on this topic, it's fun to note that I actually met Leanna in grade six end of year camp. We went to different schools but both of these schools had grade six classes so small that they were combined for the purposes of this camp. At this camp, the majority of boys from her school were obsessed with girls from my school and were constantly sneaking into this tipi to make out. I never understood the appeal of this act and I think that it wasn't until grade seven when I began to understand the appeal of female members of our species.
My past always seems to catch up to me . . . not as it would in a romantic epic but as it would in a sad tale of guilt and embarrasment. I'm not speaking of these events literally. Even as others have almost completely forgotten, I remind myself of what I've done and I writhe in the pain cast by the dark glow of these unwanted memories. And I never learn from them.
