This is it. These are the years that I am sure effected my life the most. As many of you can testify, and doctors and scientists most certainly have documented it well, our teenage years are a wasteland. And for all of us, the most awkward times of our lives.
The vivid one I need to start with was my infatuation with a girl, much like Kevin’s Winnie Cooper. I will keep names out of it, but some of you will remember that I was in love. I can’t quite remember how it became official, but we started “dating” in 5th grade.
We had set it all up to have our first kiss, which would be on the cheek, on the Forest Green school behind the gazebo after she, and the other couples ready for their first kiss, were finished their babysitting training course for that day. I did not want the responsibility of babysitting so I did not attend the course and I waited on the swings until they all came out.
There were 4 guys that were going to kiss their girlfriends for the first time. The other guys pulled through, but I was a chicken and delayed the whole thing. It was a really wussy moment in my dating life. Finally, out of frustration and not wanting to get home too late, she kissed me on the cheek. The lowest of lows, when the boyfriend chickens out and the girl has to provide the first cheek kiss.
So, I must have been 10 or 11 when I had my first girlfriend. We “dated” on and off until the end of junior high, I believe. She would dump me over and over and when she wanted me back I would gladly oblige. I cried a lot of tears over that girl.
But I think that’s how it goes for most of us. The first love is always the strangest thing. It was so hard to see that that little girl probably isn’t going to end up being my wife. But you can’t tell that to a 12 year old. To him, the future is set. “Let’s just get the next 15 years over with so that we can get married.”
At the same time, those experiences are good for us. It’s good to taste rejection. It’s good to go through a pre-teen relationship where you’re too nervous to even hold her hand. And when you eventually hold her hand your hand sweats so much that soon enough you are both clasping a puddle. But, it took so long for you to hold her hand, and it was so awkward, that neither of you has the guts to let go of the other’s hand and you just stand there like a couple of idiots. I think that these moments, looking back, are hilarious! At the time, kill be please.
It’s good because life is full of challenges and if you don’t learn how to survive them, then you just might end up being afraid of life.
Other than relationships the teenage years were filled, once again, with sports. Basketball was amazing. Playing ball with some of the same guys all through Junior High and High School was a lot of fun. In Junior High we were really good. Though, as I mentioned in another post, we always lost to Spruce Grove. But that didn’t matter. We had a great time.
I remember our coach’s breath being so bad one time that a guy joked that he must have downed a bottle of whisky before the game. That’s a pretty good joke for a kid in junior high.
I remember it being a weeknight and a teammate and I were walking through the forest going home from school. We saw two other teammates in the forest smoking pot. We were so amazed that these junior high kids did that kind of stuff on a weekday.
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It was also around when I was 12 when I had my first experience with death. I only knew the kid because I remember noticing that we had the same watches on. On the way out to a campfire on a wagon ride we talked about the good qualities of our watches. Then I never talked to him again. On the ride back he was at the front and fell off. When he fell off he got run over by the wagon carrying us 50 kids. We all looked back to see him stand up after being run over with blood running down his face and a bone sticking out of his arm. He was in shock and trying to form his voice into a noise. I am pretty sure that most of us knew that this was very serious. He died that night in the hospital and it broke us all.
He would have been my age but suddenly his aging just stopped. He will always be remembered as a little boy. He missed out on all of the girlfriends that would have broken his heart. He missed out on football. It all just stopped. The watch just stopped ticking.
Of course, the thing to say is that it could have happened to anyone that day. It could have been me. It could have been someone I knew well. What I do remember at that time was the ignorance of my sheltered life. I didn’t know that a kid could die.
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In Canada, we have grades 7-9 as junior high and grades 10-12 as high school. Age 15 is when you are the king of junior high and the loser of high school all in the same year. All of that ego that you have been building up for the last 3 years gets flushed down the toilet in a swirly. Start over, loser.
Good thing for me I had sports. They were my piano lessons. They were my ballet, if you will. They were my mechanics class. Every kid needs a hobby that helps anchor them down. I am very thankful for sports, though sports is probably the most useless of the hobbies. It is good for staying in shape, but man do I wish that I would have learned more about cars, and construction, and photography in school.
It’s probably true that the kids you think will never amount to anything end up amounting to quite a lot. Junior high is a popularity contest. If only they could get some influential person to talk to us when we’re in Junior high and say…
“For the kids that feel left out and lonely, don’t worry, things will get better. For the jocks and the cool kids, unless you smarten up, this is as good as it gets.”
My other idea is to get the government to pass a bill that would allow the schools to perform some sort of electric shock treatment so that we all come to our senses a little earlier in life. The other option is doing the all-boys school, but that has a whole other set of problems.
I guess it’s just a way of life. Get through it without being a total jerk and you’ll probably be okay.
Winnie Cooper moved on to someone else. Brett Gitzel moved on to high school.
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