Woe Is I

Mrs. Murray, the gym teacher who won the booby prize that morning was quite sweet for being a bit of a dog with a bone on most matters. She "there, there'd" me and stroked my Dorothy Hamill haircut, waited patiently outside the locker room while I got dressed and rinsed the tears from my face. She walked with me, arm around my shoulders to my next class.

We go to the classroom and I took my seat. She went to talk to Mr. Devlin, my Algebra teacher who looked up at me once or twice as they spoke in a tone just above a whisper. He made a WTF face even though no one was really saying WTF in 1978.

So this is what it feels like to be pathetic!

Divorce was not as prevalent as it is now back then. It was the 70s. People just remained miserable and slept in separate beds. I only knew one other person whose parents had been divorced and it was because her Dad had gone to jail for fraud. I felt like a statistic. Right up there with cases of Polio in the last decade.

And in the 70sx, MOMS DIDN'T LEAVE! I may as well have told Mrs. Murray that my mother had been murdered with a chainsaw for how she looked at me.

She touched my shoulder as she left my Algebra class, her tennis shoes squeaking on the floors as she swished by in her skort and warmup jacket. We never talked about it again. She'd look at me in class and ask me how I was doing, just casually enough not to make a big production, and just directly enough to let me know exactly why she was asking.

I don't know if she spoke to any of my other teachers that day. This was long before schools had counseling staffs and took the loco parent is thing so seriously. Back then your parents were your parents, no matter how lousy. I would have welcomed a heap of parentis-ing at the time.

I sleepwalked through the remainder of the day. A complete waste of time to be there. Absolutely no academic advantage to having attended even one of my classes. And I certainly didn't feel like talking about anything with anyone. A can of worms doesn't open itself. If I didn't open it, I could attempt to ignore what was inside.

On the way home on the bus, I spotted Casey from down the street.

And suddenly I felt like talking.