(I wrote this some time ago, and sat on it, for enough years that the teenager who inspired it can't possibly be in high school now, so that no local teenager would die of embarrassment.)
In high school I had a low opinion of boys, generally, even and especially the ones to whom I felt short-lived attractions. I'd learned secondhand that Teen Romance usually lasts about a week before I learned firsthand that physical attractions are lucky to last that long. I knew about love, because several relatives celebrated fiftieth or even sixtieth anniversaries, and love was not what the sillier kind of girls squealed and giggled about and the nicer sort kept strictly to ourselves. I accepted that some of the boys my age would someday become men a real woman could respect, but that would be "then." "Now," in grades nine and ten, most of the boys were noisy, clumsy, empty-headed messes whose all being sent to another school would, I thought, have been a big improvement at mine.
But there were kids who stood out from the crowd. We had a reputation for being an insanely competitive school, and the best way to stand out was to have a Major Talent that allowed you to do something better than some or all of the teachers did. There was a girl who was believed to write better poems and songs than the teachers did, a boy who was said to have more talent for music, and a boy who used to show the boys' coach how tennis ought to be played.
Call him John Doe, the star athlete. He had a nice enough face, earned good enough grades, even seemed quiet and levelheaded. He was a year ahead of me, but all the interesting classes were open to all the grades, so he was in one of my classes anyway. I remember thinking that if I ever started feeling silly about boys he'd probably be the one I had a crush on, but, possibly because he was the same sort of mixed breed I was and had too much similar DNA, that never happened. But he was much admired; he didn't seem to have much time for high school social life, but he did speak to me on a few occasions, which boosted my social status nicely.
I never thought John Doe was perfect, or an ideal, or a hero.
I never daydreamed about marrying John Doe.
I did think it was cool to watch John Doe playing tennis, or basketball, or any other sport. It was like watching a star athlete on television, only live, right there in the school gym.
My brother loyally expressed even lower opinions of most of the boys in my classes than I expressed, and mine were pretty low. I groused that Joe Jones was a kiss-up teacher’s pet; my brother wrote a story about Jones and one of the teachers being caught smooching in a closet and having their heads cut off by a Mad Mullah. Even my brother respected John Doe
We hadn't had cross-country running in previous years but, when John Doe reached grade ten, the coaches decided we needed that sport. So we had it. John Doe had his year to be recognized as the best cross-country runner in the state. He was a team player in baseball and basketball, too. Football was starting to be denounced as a violent sport. (At the time, at the NFL level, it was violent.) John Doe did not play football.
During John Doe’s sophomore year this was not such a terrible problem; the Touchdown Twins were still in grade twelve. My brother was in grade five. The high school football team got respectably close to the state championship. The junior high school football team had a tiny problem—tiny, un-athletic guys wanting to be on the team, while big strong athletic guys went out for other sports that seemed cooler because of John Doe. In the next two years this problem spread to the high school team.
Meanwhile, as had become traditional, the school band rated high enough in the high school band competitions to be invited to play on the Capitol steps. The invitation always included a week-long tour of Washington, D.C., and even kids who weren’t in the band saved their money to go along and take the educational tour of all the museums and government buildings. Everybody who was anybody at school, except me. My parents said, “Even apart from the question whether that new, young teacher can possibly chaperone that many kids in a big wicked city, which we do not for a moment believe, the weather alone at that time of year would make it stupid to travel. You’re not going.”
Coach Smith taught sixth grade social studies and coached the junior high school football team. My brother looked like football material to him. At the end of the year, when teachers and students were assigned for the next year, my brother was assigned to Coach Smith’s homeroom. “You’ll make a good quarterback,” Coach Smith gloated.
All sorts of thinkers and writers and preachers were now saying that a Christian should not play football. My brother was a Christian. He was going to run cross-country, like John Doe…even if he had to do it at another school. Next year, both of us were transferred to another school. My brother ran cross-country, but not on a team, or in competitions.
I did not want to be transferred. I did not appreciate my parents’ ruling that my brother and I were the team. We'd stopped bickering and become friends, but why ruin a good thing by overdoing it?
In addition to my being burdened with his school choice problem, that year I was also offered a baby-sitting job and told, “That’s nice. Now go and tell them that you two are a team, and make sure they pay your brother, too.”
Actually the father of the children I was going to baby-sit had come home before the mother did, one day, and been caught kissing a previous baby-sitter. I might have heard that story but wasn't thinking about it; I considered myself a repulsive baby-faced troll in any case. I wailed and carried on all evening. "Nobody hires sixth graders to baby-sit. They'll think I'm saying no in the most hateful, sarcastic way..."
"If they think that, they're too stupid to work with," Dad said, "but I don't believe they are. If you can't make that woman give a fine young man a job, you're not fit to take care of three children anyway. Four, actually. You two can't just abandon your sister. Go and tell her that you can work for a dollar an hour, which will be ten dollars a week, but your brother has to get at least half as much, and your sister should get one dollar a week for behaving her little self and giving those three a good example."
So we baby-sat as a team. Actually it worked out pretty well. Working for wages was the best part of grade ten. On weekends we were allowed to go into town together, partly to make sure all our friends knew I wasn’t pregnant or anything gross like that, spending our wages and seeing those of our friends who also went into town on weekends, which wasn’t most of them. In the local newspaper we read about John Doe’s cross-country running trophies. I wondered whether I would ever in my life get to see our nation’s capital.
Next year, I wanted to go back to my own rightful school so much, and my brother wanted to continue where he was so much, that we were finally allowed to separate during the daytime. I felt lucky that year. After the best summer teenaged siblings ever had, me baby-sitting and my brother running errands for a Real Construction Crew, I went back to my school. My official enemy had left, my official friends had remained friendly, and my locker was next to John Doe’s.
I still didn’t feel attracted to him, partly because I’d become partial to, shall we say, Jim Brown, who had about as much claim to being John Doe’s friend as anyone else had. I just basked in the envy of people who saw me actually talking to John Doe, who didn't talk much.
"Hi."
"Hello."
"If you see Jim before I do, tell him..."
High school social status: The only thing worse is when, in a small town or close-knit church, adults let it carry on into real life. Even about the people you honestly like in high school, you don't know enough to have any idea which ones might become friends in real life.
I never stooped to pretending I needed John Doe’s help to open my locker. I observed that he didn’t date; he wasn’t rich. He seemed to feel lucky to be good enough to be allowed to be the star athlete, instead of having to help take care of a disabled mother, like my official best friend Jane Smith, or an alcoholic father, like Jeff Miller whom my brother and I always pitied. (I’ll say this, though, on behalf of Jane and Jeff and some others I knew. Fewer people knew that they were doing real grown-up work but I had more respect for them than I had for the rich kids.)
In the homecoming game Jerry Johnson was quarterback. There were minimum height and weight requirements for the high school team. Johnson hadn’t met them in grades ten or eleven; it was officially claimed that he’d met them in grade twelve, but, looking at him, I wondered exactly what was in his boots at the time. At eighteen he was finally three inches taller than my brother and I. When the radio announcer screamed, “Thirty-five! Thirty! Twenty-five! Twenty! That kid can run! Touchdown! Jerry Johnson ran forty yards for a touchdown, bringing the score to 7-36, visitors still in the lead…” even my father was impressed. “Good run for a scrub,” were Dad’s words. The football team won no trophies that year. John Doe won a few more trophies, though, and Jim Brown bagged one as well.
That winter we visited my Aunt Dotty in Florida. Florida let sixteen-year-old tourists take the Graduate Equivalency test and, if we passed, go straight into college. My official enemy had gone to summer school and skipped grade twelve. People had been impressed. I could not resist the opportunity to beat his time by qualifying for college halfway through grade eleven.
I passed the test and then spent the spring term moping and goofing off, because now what was I going to do? Going back to high school seemed pointless. I wasn’t old enough to get a “real” job, go to Berea with Jim Brown, or even get into a Christian college that was close to home. The only face-saving option left to me, with my shiny G.E.D. certificate, was a Seventh-Day Adventist college in Maryland. Nobody else from my part of Virginia had ever gone there. That school had more foreign exchange students than it had students from Virginia.
“Well,” my parents and brother said, several times that spring, “at least you’ll get to see the nation’s capital.”
That summer my brother died. When I say I don’t remember much else from that year, I don’t mean that I’ve repressed memories. I mean that the days I remember were all pretty much alike: sad. I stayed busy. In other years the things I did had been fun. I didn't feel like going anywhere but the library, with anyone but my sister and the children we used to baby-sit. I had nothing to write letters about, even to Jane Smith, and didn't write to anybody or draw closer to any school friends in adult life.
Jim Brown didn’t finish a degree at Berea College. I’ll always wish him well. He did not become the sort of man I wanted to marry, though he did earn a degree at a public university and get a decent job.
John Doe found a job and a wife. So did Jerry Johnson; so did Jeff Miller. Jane Smith found a job and a husband. I’ll always wish them well, too.
I found jobs, found friends, spent about half of the next thirty years in our nation’s capital, married a nice diplomat and lived happily until cancer entered the scene. Then I came home.
The Bible says that young widows should remarry, for money if they can't earn enough on jobs, rather than ask anyone for help. As a forty-year-old widow I met a few dozen men my age and learned how true it is that, when people are single at age forty, there is a reason for this. I met exactly one man I wanted to see twice.
Handsome faces pop up on movie screens, television screens, computer screens. Nice-looking two-dimensional images. Shadows of real men that some other women, somewhere, might or might not consider attractive. Personally I don’t care. I see a good-looking young man and think, “He is (or would be) a good model for something he is (or might be) wearing,” or “He’d look the part of this or that character in a movie,” or, “If I’d married this or that fellow I used to date, and had a son, would that son look like this?”
The afternoon before I sat down to write this high school memoir for The Nephews, I saw a young man on the street. He was running like John Doe. I knew John Doe had a son. I knew who that young man had to be.
I never felt physically attracted to the father, much less the son. I felt a different kind of pleasure, though, watching John Doe's son run.
It was the pleasure of remembering when his father and I, and my brother, and Jim Brown, were the age he is now.
It was the pleasure of seeing that his father’s genes have been passed along.
It was the pleasure of having become one of those older residents of small towns who feel that we know a lot about young people when we’ve never actually talked to them, merely because we used to know their parents.
It was the pleasure of having become an old aunt who can appreciate the beauty of teen athletes, male or female, in a purely aesthetic way.
It was the pleasure of having reached one of the milestones in life.
What I want to impress on the minds of The Nephews, if the minds of teenagers can conceive of such a thing, is this: Aunts aren’t young, nor are we mothers, so you may think we have dull, joyless lives. That’s not true. There are pleasures peculiar to middle age and to aunts. This post is about one of them. If it doesn’t make sense to you yet, just remember that Romantic Love didn’t make sense to you ten years ago.
(Music link: It does relate to the story, sort of. This is one of those links from a delightful book I recently helped someone edit: a popular marching band tune often heard at high school sports events. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5bcpjUjLpU)
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