Pictures From High School

High school was technically from '82 to '86, but I may fudge things a bit. For one reason, I transferred into Penn Charter at the start of the eight grade, which is not usually considered high school. I'll take a little leeway, this somewhat arbitrary distinction is mostly to separate my late teens from the rest of childhood.

This is about as close as I would get to a sports car until 1989. After the graduation ceremony in the auditorium, I was allowed to sit in the driver's seat of Aunt Barb's new Mustang convertible. The car was at no risk, I didn't know how to drive a standard transmission yet, despite a midnight lesson in a shopping mall parking lot from my cousin in a borrowed pickup truck.

In the summer of 1985, due almost solely to the hard work and determination of my mother, I had the opportunity to spend a month in France. In this picture I am standing in front of Versailles with Hérald Windak, whose family took me into their home for that month. Hérald had stayed with us the previous summer in Philadelphia. My mother and I have remained in touch with the Windaks since then, with several visits in both directions. In fact much of the Windak family stayed with us here in the US for this past Christmas. At some point I hope to find and scan my photos from the Summer of '85.

Is this the worst photo or what? This scan is taken from the world's worst fake identification card. Our junior class trip to Washington showed us a lot of important things - the Air and Space Museum, the worst motel to stay in, the best place to go for drug paraphenalia in Georgetown... For reasons that must have made sense at the time, I bought an incredibly lame fake ID. I took it seriously too - I selected a date that wouldn't make me 21 for a year or so in order to make sure that the ID didn't seem too new, and so that I would appear a little older than the photo. Kids...

Penn Charter has been educating the sons - and since the 1980's, daughters - of Philadelphia's elite for more than 300 years. Part of that training involves the usual college preparatory cirriculum: language, literature, mathematics, the sciences, and so on. PC takes great pride in its integration of athletics into the cirriculum as well. But perhaps the most important lessons are those that will serve to help one enter the Old Boy Network that actually runs things in most cities. To that end, one must learn discretion: see nothing incriminating; hear nothing that may cause a subpoena to be served; and say nothing that may lead to an indictment of any kind for yourself or your fellows.

Alright, that was an awfully long setup for a pretty meager payoff. And pretty cynical. Consider it a taste of how cynical and generally bitter I was in high school. Despite the fact that some pretty wonderful things were going on, I was not a happy kid. But then, isn't that usually the definition of being a teenager in America?