7th Grade

Labor Day, 1968, was the worst day of my life!  I hated it!  I never could understand why the stupid people in charge of running our schools would want to go and ruin a perfectly good holiday by making it the day before school started.  How could anybody enjoy the holiday with that hanging over their heads?  This year was worse than ever because I was starting junior high the next day and I was scared silly!

Junior high meant going to a new, huge school with all kinds of new kids, new teachers, and tons of classrooms.  I was sure I would get lost or forget which room I was supposed to be in, and my imagination ran wild envisioning the horrible things that could happen to me in such a huge place. 

We always had a picnic at Grandma Johnson's on Labor Day.  I loved getting together with my family, but not on this day.  I couldn't figure out why my brothers and sisters and cousins weren't sick to their stomachs like I was.  They might not be ready for the summer to be over, but they were all happily looking forward to getting back together with their friends and discussing their new grades and teachers while they ate hamburgers, munched chips, slurped pop, and licked the inevitable ice cream cones Grandma always provided for the last day of summer.  I couldn't eat a thing because I felt like throwing up.

There was no way I could go to sleep that night.  Just like on Christmas Eve, but for opposite reasons, my eyes were wired open and the hours crawled by like years.  Whenever I did drift off to sleep I would startle awake ten minutes later afraid I was late, only to realize I still had hours to go and was unable to fall back to sleep.  That was the longest night of the year.

Mom tried to make the first day of school fun, I'm sure, preparing a special breakfast and helping us find book bags, clothes, shoes, notebooks, and all the other stuff we needed.  She drove me to school that first day, although from then on I walked.  This was my older brother Keith's second year in junior high, and he knew where everything was and what to do, but that didn't help me at all.  I never saw him after we got out of the car; Keith was swallowed up in a group of laughing girls and boys headed to their lockers.  I was left, standing on the curb, wishing I was invisible or dead, or anywhere besides junior high