Coop’s Youth Part 2 – Summer of Love & Respite | Lefty Parent

Coop’s Youth Part 2 – Summer of Love & Respite | Lefty Parent:

Coop’s Youth Part 2 – Summer of Love & Respite

August 8th, 2014 at 12:43

I felt the profoundest sense of relief when the last bell rang ending the last day of my first year at Tappan Junior High School. All us students spilled out onto the big front lawn on the south side of the school overlooking Stadium boulevard, a part of the school’s campus that seemed rarely used during the school year. We had all been given our yearbooks and the idea was we would all mill around together signing each other’s copies with cute or poignant little memorable comments. One last exercise in social hierarchy. All the cool kids clustered around each other laughing, joking and signing each other’s copies.

At the end of my first year in this institution I maybe knew the names of a hundred of the some thousand kids in the school, and most of the ones I knew I was uncomfortable asking to sign my yearbook. Uncomfortable asking the few girls I had gotten to know as classmates, project or lab partners, hoping they would ask me, which one or two actually did, to my relief. Uncomfortable asking the cool kids (or who I perceived to be the cool kids) I knew for fear of their scorn leveled deftly with a roll of the eyes or a blank gaze and an obligatory “sure”. Playing it safe, I ended up asking just a handful of the boys in my immediate neighborhood that I knew previously from elementary school and interacting with them in the park across the street from my house. I left the campus once more diminished by my experience in the place, but glad at least that I had a ten week reprieve.

I had first entered Tappan’s nondescript halls imagining myself one of the “alpha” boys and a star student. Now ten months later I was questioning both those presumptions and feeling neither. Best to just lick my wounds and retreat from the battlefield still with a heartbeat, and maybe share war stories with my neighborhood friends over the summer in an attempt to process the post-traumatic stress and reframe and regain a little self-esteem. None of them had ascended into the ranks of the cool kids either.

The routines of my “normal” summer were comforting. My Little League team from last year reconvened, now with a new coach and sponsored by Bimbo’s Coop’s Youth Part 2 – Summer of Love & Respite | Lefty Parent: