memoir

The Smell of High School

/ wvfurandroot / 4 Comments

In 1976 and 1977, the scents of Charlie perfume and Right Guard deodorant collided in my high school.  All the cool girls wore Charlie, and everyone used Right Guard.  The May that I was due to graduate was hot, and the school wasn’t air-conditioned. Imagine hundreds of puberty-ridden teens filling stuffy hallways.  The scent was overwhelming and accompanied by the slamming of metal locker doors.

Built in 1916, the school was massive and architecturally interesting.  It still stands and is used for a variety of things, but in the late ’70s, it swarmed with students. I was one of them.  There were more than four hundred in my graduating class. 

The basement opened into an outdoor area called the arch.  It was cool and dim and packed with teenage smokers.  The arch smelled of burnt tobacco, as well as Charlie perfume and failed Right Guard.  Sometimes you could catch a whiff of pot.  We stood there during lunch, smoking and talking.  I mostly listened.  I was still considered the new kid, and nobody knew me.  Nobody tried to know me.

I had an advanced biology class in one of the coolest rooms, although it was on the third floor.  The biology lab was furnished in 1930s-era lab tables, and the teacher, Mr. Berry, was a legend.  We were dissecting fetal pigs, and the room reeked of formaldehyde as well as Charlie perfume and Right Guard.  Sometimes I would sit in there at lunchtime with other students and work on my pig. 

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National Pancake Day was yesterday

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National Pancake Day was yesterday. As usual, I’m a day late and a dollar short. Nevermind that I had a pecan waffle with extra pecans sans syrup at the Waffle House this morning.

Still and all, I offer you this, my homage to maple syrup (and to pancakes though indirectly.)

As a child, I did not like pancake syrup though I loved the shape of the Aunt Jemima glass bottle. Everyone thought I was weird, but I much preferred my pancakes and French toast with tons of butter. Dripping with butter. Drowning in it. Floating.

Some time during my misspent early adulthood, I did not mark the day in my calendar of things to remember, I was unceremoniously given pancakes with syrup already applied. Not wanting to be one of those people, I unenthusiastically loaded a forkful and put it in my mouth.

Oh my. All the pleasure pheromones and chemicals and other assorted signals lit up like a Christmas tree at the North Pole and I smiled big and broad.

Real maple syrup tapped from trees is one of God’s gifts

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The Tree on Williams Street

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The crab apple tree in front of our Williams Street house wasn’t imposing or even all that old, but it was perfect to climb and hide in.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Actually, I wasn’t all that hidden when sitting there, but most people didn’t look up to peer for children amongst the branches.

I clocked a lot of hours in that tree.

Williams was a dead-end street so there wasn’t much to see other than the occasions when the neighbor’s teenager would climb onto their roof and play his trumpet.  Weird kid. Bad trumpet player, but I suppose he should get credit for practicing.

I’m sure that I dragged a book up there with me now and again, but I don’t remember reading in the tree.  Of course, I read everywhere.  I read like most people breathe – everywhere all the time. 

I was older—12, 13, 14 – on the cusp – living my life, but also waiting for it to begin.

I do remember one vivid day at 14 when I waited for my boyfriend while sitting in the tree and there he came, bepopping down the middle of Williams, carrying the largest heart-shaped box of candy I’d ever seen.  Whitman’s.  It was Valentine’s Day – a special occasion.  I usually did my tree-sitting in the summer.

I liked being in the tree. I felt hidden and the configuration of the branches made climbing easy.  The trunk and major limb were in such a position as to make reclining in the tree very comfortable for my lithe teenage self.

One summer I took to making caftans out of old sheets.  I’d waft around in yards of white percale dragging behind me and eventually climb the tree –no mean feat in an oversized sheet and sit there pondering the universe. Feeling spiritual and Egyptian in my badly sewn caftan.

Kenny-the-roof-trumpeter had nothing on me in the weirdness department. 

I do remember dragging bags of Doritos into the tree with me. I carried the bag in my clenched teeth reserving both hands to scramble up the tree.  Doritos were the new snack and took the country by storm.  There were two flavors – plain and taco.  I loved the taco ones and considered the bag a single serving.  I was always hungry in those days. A bottomless pit of hunger and volatile hormones.

I’d wipe my orange-stained fingers on my caftan when done. 

So, there I was, a long gangly teenager in a bedsheet streaked with orange stains perched in a tree going through puberty one long summer day at a time. 



























What was your favorite Saturday morning cartoon?

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It just wasn’t Saturday without Tom & Jerry, Felix the Cat, and Bullwinkle & Rocky, but my favorite cartoons were the old classics:  Silly Symphonies and all the Looney Tunes.  Oh, how I laughed.  Oh, how I was entranced.  Dancing teacups, sentient plants, Singing tubs of cold cream. No wonder we grew up to be the generation that put music videos into the mainstream. 

My brother and I would assemble on the floor in the living room.  Bowl of cereal in front of us far too close to the television.  Mom would say, you’re too close to the television and we would scooch back.  After two bowls of Sugar Pops with the Sugar Bear mascot, I’d be wired for sound.  I did love that cereal which is odd because I wasn’t much of a cereal eater as I hated milk.  I often ate my sugar pops without or as little as possible.

Funny, but I can’t remember the order of the cartoons though I remember that I was done by the time Johnny Quest came on.  Sometimes I’d watch it, other times not.  My brother was done before then and likely in the backyard with his Tonka trucks. 

At about the age of 10 or 11, I added American Bandstand to Saturday cartoons.  I think it came on at noon.  In later years, soul train followed.

When I got older yet, I discovered that often there were old movies on in the afternoon.  I Sugar Popped my way through musicals, film noir, Jerry Lewis, and Tammy movies.

Saturdays were blissful.  The only real day I didn’t have much to do.  Sure, we were expected to clean our room and do other housecleaning duties, but none of that “no playing until chores were done.”  As long as we did get it done, we were pretty free to choose when.  No school, no church, hours and hours to just be.  Laughing at cartoons, reading Beverly Clearly, eating when hungry, and straightening my bedroom when I was good and ready to. 

As an adult, I watched cartoons with my son.  I wonder if he realizes how cheated he was.  Everything has a moral, a lesson, a sponsor.  No silliness just for the sake of being silly.  No whimsy.  No dancing tubs of cold cream. 

I am resolved to buy the old Warner Brothers stuff on DVD so that my grandson will have those hours of childhood.  Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, The Roadrunner.  What a golden period for cartoons.