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Many years ago, in a land too far away, I went to High School. I had been in California for less than a year and the adjustment from Minnesota wasn't smooth. I ended up going to one half of 8th Grade at a nearby middle school and the experience was unpleasant to a degree that I opted to bus to a school about thirty minutes from home rather than deal with some of the jerks I'd met.
So I ended up at an academic/theater magnet school where I was a minority student with no neighborhood ties. I had an opportunity to forge a new identity, which I utterly ignored. I also had no set social group, and gravitated toward a crowd of folks in the same boat.
We were a motley bunch, largely but not exclusively drawn from the drama and tech theater departments (or drawn into them). One of the ringleaders was a guy I met freshman year, same class as me, named Mike.
Mike was remarkably tolerant of my, uh, let's call them quirks. (Really, this is a nice way of saying I was high energy, imaginative, odd and insecure. I still have a yearbook wherein he described me as a "freshman among freshmen." I'm pretty sure this was a dig.) We shared an angled view of life, and it was with him I went to my first concert at the Oakland Coliseum. He threw parties that quite literally got him a reputation with the parents of Santa Clara Valley. I was a semi-permanent wallflower at these, always with a 10pm curfew, always meeting my parents out at the street, lest they get a glimpse of the bacchanalia and lock me in a monastery. None of this was of a, "Dude! He's gonna trash yer parents' house when yer outta town" nature, but few non-violent boundaries were acknowledged.
He was one of the first of us to get a place of his own, a beaten little house next to an auto body shop. Biohazard, as it was known, became quite the social nexus point for me, party or not. I spent enough time there that I'd guess it actually stunted my urge to get a place of my own.
Over the years most of the friends from the earliest of these eras have either drifted in and out of my life or dropped out completely. Later folk are actually here on the friends list. But the one real constant has been Mike. His trip to Europe in 1987 introduced my now-wife to the crowd. He was my Best Man at the wedding and I was a groomsman in his. When I started to freak out about going to Berkeley (since damn near everyone I told reacted with a "UC Berkeley? THE Berkeley? Whoa!") Mike was the one who came back with, "Well, of course you got in. What did you expect? They're gonna take you," which calmed me down immeasurably.
It's hard to grasp that today is Mike's fortieth birthday. In the cold light of day I know I'm going to be the same age in about five months, but it's not nearly the reality that impending parenthood is. But Mike? Who I met when I was fourteen?!? I certainly knew him by this time of year in 1983, which means we've known each other for twenty-five years now.
Happy Birthday, Mike. You've enriched my life for decades, and I look forward to another twenty-five years of Bloom County and Muppet references and being agog that either of us is sixty-five.
So I ended up at an academic/theater magnet school where I was a minority student with no neighborhood ties. I had an opportunity to forge a new identity, which I utterly ignored. I also had no set social group, and gravitated toward a crowd of folks in the same boat.
We were a motley bunch, largely but not exclusively drawn from the drama and tech theater departments (or drawn into them). One of the ringleaders was a guy I met freshman year, same class as me, named Mike.
Mike was remarkably tolerant of my, uh, let's call them quirks. (Really, this is a nice way of saying I was high energy, imaginative, odd and insecure. I still have a yearbook wherein he described me as a "freshman among freshmen." I'm pretty sure this was a dig.) We shared an angled view of life, and it was with him I went to my first concert at the Oakland Coliseum. He threw parties that quite literally got him a reputation with the parents of Santa Clara Valley. I was a semi-permanent wallflower at these, always with a 10pm curfew, always meeting my parents out at the street, lest they get a glimpse of the bacchanalia and lock me in a monastery. None of this was of a, "Dude! He's gonna trash yer parents' house when yer outta town" nature, but few non-violent boundaries were acknowledged.
He was one of the first of us to get a place of his own, a beaten little house next to an auto body shop. Biohazard, as it was known, became quite the social nexus point for me, party or not. I spent enough time there that I'd guess it actually stunted my urge to get a place of my own.
Over the years most of the friends from the earliest of these eras have either drifted in and out of my life or dropped out completely. Later folk are actually here on the friends list. But the one real constant has been Mike. His trip to Europe in 1987 introduced my now-wife to the crowd. He was my Best Man at the wedding and I was a groomsman in his. When I started to freak out about going to Berkeley (since damn near everyone I told reacted with a "UC Berkeley? THE Berkeley? Whoa!") Mike was the one who came back with, "Well, of course you got in. What did you expect? They're gonna take you," which calmed me down immeasurably.
It's hard to grasp that today is Mike's fortieth birthday. In the cold light of day I know I'm going to be the same age in about five months, but it's not nearly the reality that impending parenthood is. But Mike? Who I met when I was fourteen?!? I certainly knew him by this time of year in 1983, which means we've known each other for twenty-five years now.
Happy Birthday, Mike. You've enriched my life for decades, and I look forward to another twenty-five years of Bloom County and Muppet references and being agog that either of us is sixty-five.
