Speaking of high school…
Tonight Casablanca was on TV. I’ve never seen the movie in its entirety, but I’ve caught glimpses of it here and there. Tonight I tuned in during the scene where the German officers are singing a patriotic song, and the French override them with “La Marseillaise.”
The first time I saw that scene, something about the German song seemed very familiar. I found myself anticipating the melody. Then some lyrics suggested themselves: “Guiding our hearts and minds for future days…” What was it?
Oh, yeah. It was the tune for my high school’s alma mater. Whoever wrote it appropriated the music from a German battle hymn — that later became a Nazi drinking song.
Yale University apparently made the same error in judgment.
Husband is away this weekend for his high school reunion, leaving me alone with the haughty triumvirate, otherwise known as the Three Who Do Not Hesitate to Inform Me When Everything Isn’t Going Exactly Their Way.
Husband and I graduated from high school the same year, and five years ago we both attended both reunions. That was in 2002, and it boggles my mind that we were telling people then that we were pursuing adoption, but Aitch was still a year away from being born. When I think about traveling for those parties, it feels like yesterday, but when I divide the time up into homestudies and waiting for referral and waiting for travel, times two, it feels like it has dragged.
Like most people, I was apprehensive about attending my reunion, because like most people I felt like a freak and an outcast in high school. It was not because I came from the wrong side of the tracks or anything like that. Our social scene did not operate according to the conventions of a typical John Hughes movie; there were plenty of poor kids who were very popular. It was more of a meritocracy, and all you really needed was a little bit of social skill, something I sorely lacked. I mean, I was a baton twirler and a cheerleader and I drove a very cool 1964 Triumph Spitfire convertible, and I was pretty much despised by the other baton twirlers and ignored by the other cheerleaders and generally Not Liked. I don’t think I was a terrible person, but I was introverted and socially awkward, which came off as stuck-up, and the more I was teased for that behavior the more awkward I became.
So the last reunion was not a big showdown between the Socs and the freaks. It was a pretty casual DJ-and-buffet kind of thing at the Lierderkranz, which is the Pennsylvania Dutch version of an ethnic social club, like the Victor Emmanuel or the Knights of Hibernia. It was sort of fun, and I talked to a number of people I would have been too shy to speak to during high school.
At one point in the evening, I was accosted by a man I did not recognize. “Denise!” he yelled, and gave me a huge hug. I looked at him. I have a pretty good memory for faces, an even better one for names, and I had no idea who this man was. “Don’t you remember me? I’m Jürgen, the exchange student from Denmark!”
Holy crap. We had an exchange student from Denmark? And he flew all the way back to attend an event at the Liederkranz?
Even armed with that information, I was pretty sure I had never spoken a word to him in high school. So how did he come to remember me so fondly? Well, it turns out that during his entire year abroad, he had pined from afar after…my car. My 1964 white convertible Triumph Spitfire with the blue interior. He had been in love with it, and he had never gotten over it.
That’s a lesson for you high school boys and girls out there. Don’t worry so much about your grades, your extracurricular activities, your college applications, your boyfriend or girlfriend. What really counts is a cool car. In twenty years, you’re most likely to be remembered for your ride.
Last week, my iPod Mini became unusable by slow degrees. First, the armband disintegrated. Then, the headphones lost the connection to the right ear, except for intermittent scratchy bursts that occurred only when I had jacked up the volume to compensate. Then the battery slowly lost its ability to hold a charge: two miles, one mile, half a mile. It never died just as I was leaving the house, just long enough to make turning back kind of silly.
So I pretty much lost my will to run. Running is tedious. I need some kind of technology-based motivator to keep me interested.
Still, I persevered, and soon began to appreciate the sensation of running to the soundtrack of only the music of the spheres. The other day, I went running with Dog and had to take a roundabout route to avoid a bridge that would cause him to have a nervous breakdown. When I got back I wondered how far we had gone, and tried to add it up by my usual precision method of Googling up a local map, pinching my thumb and forefinger into the unhelpful distance supplied on the scale (2000 feet), and then counting up how many of those spaces fit into my route and dividing by the number of feet in a mile. This, I believe, is the method developed by NASA to calculate distance and trajectory for space missions.
But what’s good enough for NASA isn’t necessarily good enough for me, and I found myself thinking, “There’s GOT to be a better way to measure a running route.” And after a little Googling, I found WalkJogRun. It’s brilliant: not only can you plan your run and measure each leg with a few easy clicks, you can save your runs and view other people’s favorite routes in your area. Had I had access to this in San Antonio, I might not have ended up running the concierge-recommended “urban blight” trail.
It also lets you enter your speed and weight and calculate your likely caloric expenditure, provided you don’t stop mid-run for a beer.
