Doomsday.

AIEEEEEE!!😱

I kid. It's been many a long year since I feared the first day of school, which is what we have today in the Hudson Valley. As I write this, it was twenty minutes ago I saw the high school bus go by. I think I've seen happier faces on the bus to Rikers.

I alluded to my own school experiences a little last week: the first day of school was usually fraught with both anxiety and excitement. New teacher(s)! New classmates! New subjects! New school supplies! All of these could make me happy or miserable in the months ahead.

To be honest, I was almost always more anxious than anything. I clearly remember my first day of kindergarten -- I had attended preschool, which was mostly a place to stick me while my parents worked, but then we moved and I had a year off. TV all day! Just me and Mom! Yeah, a fella could get used to this soft living. But the fateful day arrived, and I had to go to kindergarten. Not one kid who lived near me went to my public school. I was being thrown to the wolves. All I'd seen of the school to that point were those hulking, monstrous fifth graders sneering from the basketball court when Mom took me in to sign me up.

Many years later, I heard a woman say, "I didn't have a drink the day I started kindergarten, but I could have used one." And I thought, Yep.

Funny -- as it turned out I liked that school and made some friends I kept for decades.

Six years after that fateful first day I started intermediate school, and was so excited I thought I would explode. I was going to different classes all day like a grown-up! That was unbelievably thrilling, to have different classes and different teachers to break up the day. I did have some friends going to this school, so that would be excellent. I was so worked up that I memorized the Welcome! pamphlet, including the map and the location of all my classes. Sixth grade was going to be AWESOME.

Oh, no. No, it was not awesome.

The school was across town, near a very rough neighborhood. Beatings were distributed to the dumb middle-class kids pretty much as soon as we arrived and occasionally thereafter. We thought we could hold our own because of our occasional fistfights in elementary school, but these kids would keep coming at you and upping the stakes until you were bleeding, and they had no compunctions against sneak attacks. Smoking, alcohol, drugs, weaponry, and pubescent pregnancy were not the kinds of things that we had been led to expect by our school experiences prior to this.

Eventually we found the good teachers, and we survived, or most of us did. Some kids managed to get their parents to get them into private schools and out of that nightmare. The rest of us managed to learn something. No one I know died, at least not in the three years at that school.

High school sucked, but for mostly different reasons.

Thoughts of my own first school days are thus always colored with the many weird circumstances of attending public school in New York City. I don't miss it at all. I wouldn't go back for a million dollars.

📏📕📓📐📎📒📖📚🏆🏫

P.S.: I will say I was stunned to discover that kids in other places in America actually had lockers. In my junior high you couldn't even keep your gym shorts at school; the lock on your gym locker would be busted the next day. In my schools they didn't even bother assigning full-size lockers, as I see kids using in any TV show or book set in a junior or senior high. They knew everything would be raided and trashed the second the hallway was empty. My junior high had a row of lockers outside the principal's office and no one could use them, because the Future Inmates of America would bust them open. The administrators took off the locker doors. There was no point.

P.P.S.: Future Inmates of America gag stolen by me from Michael Fry. From his locker.