December 5, 2007

• It seems to me that most people spend their childhoods dreaming of all the things they'll be allowed to do when they're finally "grown up."  (For me, that one privilege I could not wait to enjoy was driving a car.)  Yet, adults seem to spend a lot of time reminiscing about and wishing for the simple life they enjoyed as children.  We're never happy, not that that's a great revelation or anything.

  Recently, my nostalgia has been directed toward the friendships and relationships I fostered in my earliest years of elementary school, back when I still lived in South Carolina.  Although the vast majority of my friends were girls, I was abnormal among my peers in that my very best friend in second grade was a boy.  His name was Zachary, and even at the tender age of eight or so he had already picked up his father's habit of cracking a joke at every opportunity.  I remember him dancing around our classroom nearly every day, singing "Shake, Shake, Shake" or the theme from "Happy Days."  And believe me, you haven't heard anything until you've heard a second grade boy screaming "Shake your booty!" at the top of his lungs, complete with dance moves to match.  Even at the time I remember thinking how absurd such a scenario was.

  Even in my very conservative Southern town, the science classes laid the foundation for a study of evolution in later grades by firmly insisting that humans were animals, related most closely to monkeys such as chimpanzees.  One day, a very confused but ever smirking Zach confided in me, "The teacher says we are animals.  I asked my mother, and she said we aren't.  And then I asked my dad, and he said, 'Sometimes!'"  My blank stare prompted him to continue, "You know, like sometimes we're pigs or monkeys or something..."  I'm sure I retorted with a smart comment such as, "Well, you look like a monkey all the time," but his ability to inject humor into our studies, all the while reconciling his beliefs with the material he had to know for the test, stays with me to this day.

  Although I'm sure there were days Zach wasn't his usual chipper self, the only time I can remember him ever seeming sad was my last day of second grade.  By that time, we knew that I would not be returning in the fall; my father, in fact, was already working in Ohio at that point.  As we waited for our rides after school, Zachary, apparently very uncomfortable, came up to me, handed me a plain brown paper lunch bag, and walked away.  Inside I found a small stuffed moose, labeled "Mikey" on the tag.  Mikey sits to this day on my bookshelf, right next to all my CDs; I can see him, in fact, from where I sit now.  I don't know if this goodbye token was Zach's idea or his mother's, but I like to think he wanted me to have an animal to remember him by, although where the whole moose thing fits in with his personality I'm not sure.  I think a monkey would have been much more appropriate.

  I'm sure I saw Zachary later that summer before I left, but that's the goodbye I remember.  And it makes me wish I could have that friendship back, even if just for a day.  For nine months, Zach and I were practically inseparable.  And, as quickly as it started, that friendship was gone, lost to 500 miles of interstate and an Internet too young to facilitate keeping in touch on a daily basis.  I kind of regret that I can never have that again, a perfectly platonic relationship with the opposite sex, no strings attached.

  I learned a lot in the second grade:  the proper pronunciation of the word "thoroughly," that Robinson Crusoe isn't exactly light reading for an eight-year-old, and every word of "That's the Way (I Like It)."  Uh-huh, uh-huh.

  • 11:45 pm
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