So it's June 19, 1969, the day I graduated from University High School. I'd attended Uni for three years but it somehow felt like thirty. Days passed slower when I was that age. Christmases were actually one whole year apart.
This is the second part of a remembrance of that day. If you missed Part One, it's here and it should be read before proceeding. If you have read it, let's proceed right after the following warning…
Now then. I was eager to get outta high school for several reasons, one being that I felt I'd long since stopped learning whatever there was to learn there. I was going to enter U.C.L.A. the following fall but before that happened, I wanted to somehow launch my career as a professional writer…a career I'd decided on more than ten years earlier.
No kidding: I wanted to be a writer from around the age of six. When you're that young, adults seem incapable of asking you much of anything except…
- When's your birthday?
- What's your favorite color?
- And what do you want to be when you grow up?
I had all the answers: March 2nd, orange and a writer. In that order. "A writer?" they'd puzzle. "Don't you want to be a spaceman or a cowboy?"
"Nope," I'd say. "A writer." Right now, I'd feel like a total failure in life if I'd picked being a spaceman or a cowboy. At this very moment, I'm doing what I wanted to do when I was six…something that as of less than a week from now, I'll have been doing for fifty friggin' years. That's five-oh.
Still, though I'd decided on my life's work early on, I hadn't decided what I wanted to be a writer of. There were plenty of enticing options: TV shows, movies, comic books, cartoons, plays, novels…
Since I didn't have to commit at that age, I figured I'd wait 'til I got old enough and see which if any of those became feasible. To my grand surprise, most of them did.
I was 17 on 6/19/69 — younger than most of my classmates because I'd skipped a few grades — but old enough, I thought, to begin figuring out the "of." I wanted to begin actually being a writer and just as much if not more, I wanted something else. I wanted a girl friend. I'd had friends who were girls but there's a big difference between having a girl be your friend and having her be your girl friend. And it's not the same difference as having sex and not having sex.
I hadn't even tried to get a girl friend for about eleven reasons and all of them were Fear. This is going to sound like the most cowardly, gutless thing in the world to anyone who hasn't been in my position but this is what I was afraid of: That I'd ask a girl out, she'd say no and then I'd have to sit next to her in Geometry for an entire semester being reminded of that turndown. Graduation Day was not only the day to make my move, it was Now or Never.
There were a number of girls in my class that I liked but there were three that I really liked. Really, really liked. Since at least one of them reads this blog, I won't say which of the three I preferred but I would have set fire to my comic book collection for any one of them.
Wait. No, I wouldn't have. That's the kind of thing that comes out of you if you're desperate enough. Let's just say I wanted just one of them to say, "Sure, Mark. I'd love to go out with you some evening." The graduation ceremony was going to be followed by a milling period where we graduates could all say farewell to each other. My plan — if you can call it a plan — was that I would locate as many of the three as I could and ask them for the phone numbers and some sort of signal that they wouldn't call the police if I asked them out to dinner.
There were also a few guys — just a few — that I wanted to make sure I stayed in touch with, plus a few more I didn't particularly want to stay in touch with but I felt a pleasant "Goodbye forever" was in order. I managed to talk with all of them and exchange contact info with the few before the ceremony so that was done.
Sitting there, waiting for the boring speeches to end, I kept thinking, "Get on with this! I have phone numbers to get! I didn't imagine that my plan had one major obstacle: My Aunt Dot.
I've written here before of Aunt Dot, a lovely, sweet lady who was incapable of intentionally harming another human being, me especially. But she sometimes had odd ideas and she could be fairly stubborn about them. She was at the ceremony along with my father, my mother and my Uncle Nathan. Nathan was my father's brother. Dot was their sister. Aunt Dot had decided that after the festivities, we should all go celebrate at a rather famous Italian restaurant downtown called Little Joe's.
None of us had ever been there before but Aunt Dot had heard it was wonderful and that's where she insisted we dine. I suggested that instead, we go to Zito's, which was my favorite restaurant of any kind, Italian or otherwise. Like most folks with major food allergies, I have never liked trying new places to eat. Aunt Dot, alas, was one of these "you should always try new things" people. The fact that none of us had been to Little Joe's was, to her, an inarguable reason for going there and not to Zito's.
Zito's was a lot closer…like, a ten minute drive as opposed to 45 minutes in rush-hour traffic. At Little Joe's, we needed a reservation (which she had made) whereas we could just show up at Zito's and get a table. I argued all that, plus the notion that since it was my graduation, maybe we should go where I preferred to go?
Nope. We had to go to Little Joe's. After all, why drive ten minutes to a place we know we'll love when we can drive forty-five to a place we might not like? If I sound like I'm dwelling overlong on this, it may be that after one week plus half-a-century later, I'm still having some residual anger about it.
It started ten seconds after I was handed my diploma and I walked over to where my parents, aunt and uncle were sitting. They all congratulated me, my mother helped me out of the silly cap and gown, and then Aunt Dot said, "Let's go! We have a 5:00 reservation and it's a long drive."
I gulped and said, "I need some time to say goodbye to some people." She said, "Well, okay. But make it quick."
What happened next will have to wait for tomorrow, folks.