Like I Have Time For This?

I picked up Empire Falls by Richard Russo at the library last week, and I was struck by this passage today: 

When Mr. Meyer asked Tick is she could live with [eating her lunch alone in the empty cafeteria after it closed so that she could make room for art in her class schedule] she wondered, as she so often did, at the strange world adults seemed to inhabit. Did they all suffer from some sort of collective amnesia? You had only to look at Mr. Meyer to know that he’d been the kind of fat kid everybody made fun of and that lunch had surely been a torment to him. He’d either gravitated naturally to the leper table or sat by himself at a table designed for sixteen, a target for all the kids over-crowding the cool tables, the tables that were identified as cool by who had a right to sit at them, codes established the first day of school, the rules clear to everyone, no need for color coding. You had only to look at Mr. Meyer to know he’d spent all his high school years getting hit in the back of the head with all manner of throwable food, yet here he was worried that Tick was going to miss out on the important “socialization” aspects of a good secondary education. (pp.74-75)

This seems to be a universal high school experience. All of us, at some point, have existed on some level of this particular social spectrum: the high school cafeteria. Was there ever any place more vapid and horrible?

Back when I was in high school, I avoided the lunch room simply by hanging out in the smoking area. I’d dive into the sandwich line, grab a dry, tasteless tuna salad on hard roll and a little carton of milk and then head outside. I’d scarf down the food and then sit and smoke, and if I had no one to talk to, I could pull off that “aloof smoker reading a book” thing and manage not to look too strange. Of course, it took twenty years to kick the cigarette habit, but at least I survived high school, right?

When people who don’t homeschool find out that I do homeschool, there’s always that small off-beat moment of silence where you can practically smell their opinions and preconceived notions about me suddenly CHANGE and they’re clamoring to find some way to RELATE to me, and it’s almost comical. Then they find out I’m actually planning on doing this bizarre educational thing, like, FOREVER all the way through high school, and they really don’t know what to do with me.

Sometimes, while watching them sputter, I wish I could ask them, so where exactly did you sit in the high school cafeteria?

We’re taking the day off and going to the beach today. Oh, I guess we’ll spend some time talking about oceans and fish and shells and currents and dunes and gulls, so it won’t be a complete day off from educational exploits. For lunch, we’ll get some pizza on a boardwalk somewhere. That’s what homeschooling looks like sometimes, and I gotta tell you, it sure beats getting slapped in the head with some asshole’s soggy fish filets during 7th period lunch hour.

Call me crazy if you want.