Then there's June 6, 1982. Twenty-five years ago, when I crossed the stage at the MeadowBrook Auditorium on the campus of Oakland University in suburban Detroit, one of several hundred Bloomfield Hills Lahser seniors accepting diploma covers that would hold the paperwork proclaiming our passage from the seemingly sheltered life of high school into the unknown universe of college.
Damn! Has it really been 25 years? A rhetorical question; "Of course it has - you already stated it!" So much has changed, yet so much has stayed the same.
At the time, I thought my high school friends would be friends for ages and that I was ready to take the next step. History and 20/20 hindsight has not proven to be as kind or able to validate my optimistic view of the time on both of these areas; I now converse with only one of my fellow graduates regularly (and maybe 1-2 others once every blue moon), and my immediate post-high school educational experience was ... less than stellar (and I am being overly kind with my assessment). I've conveniently blown off the 10- and 20-year reunions (I chose the 10-year to move into a new apartment in Waterford, Michigan, while I was in Florida for the 20th), and have heard nothing about a 25-year get-together.
But I am not here to lament the failure to stay in touch with those who helped (or hindered, depending on how you look at it) my formative years. Instead, i'm going to try to pound out a "Top 10" list of positive memories I have managed to hold on to from 1979-82, when I roamed the halls of Lahser High School. I am sure some of my memories are tainted by lost brain cells the past quarter-century, but what the heck? I'll give it a shot. And I won't even consult my yearbooks for this ...
10 - Earning my drivers licence, March 1980: More specifically, that moment during the winter of 1979 when, during driver's training, I took a left turn at Hickory Grove and Lahser roads a bit too quickly and spun out the car. After coming to a halt, I looked at the instructor and said, sheepishly, "I must have hit some sheet ice." He didn't buy it.
9 - Announcing the Lahser-Troy Athens state soccer regular-season match on WBFH-FM, Fall 1981: Also know as the most amazing soccer game no one could see, because it was raining - POURING - and the field was a quagmire of mud. Lahser was #1 in the state, Athens #2, and in an attempt to trick the opposing team, Lahser's coach had its top star player switch jerseys with another player. (The trick didn't work.) Athens won, but the really fun part in the booth was knowing we were broadcasting on the only land-line, and if there were a medical emergency, we'd have to pull the plug on our broadcast so that medical personnel could use the telephone line. That or my screams of "Oy!" when Lahser hit the goalpost on back to back attempts. I can still hear Scott Booth and Pete Bowers laughing in the background.
8 - Rolling Stones/Santana/Iggy Pop, The Pontiac Silverdome, December 1981: Iggy flopped, Santana rocked, and 70,000+ chanted "You can't always get what you want" a'cappella with Mick and the boys.
7 - The Bobbles "Save The World: Liverpool to Lahser" Tour, 1982: The Bobbles were the band Scott Booth, Tim Olson and I created that reworked Beatles lyrics with environmental themes; we named the band after Robert Kefgen, our AP-turned-science teacher. Among our chart-toppers: "Nuclear Submarine" (about nuclear submarines, of course), "Why Don't We Do It To A Toad?" (about biology and dissection, of course), and "All You Need Is Bob" (a tribute song, of course).
6 - Senior Prom, Memorial Day Weekend 1982: The family was in Philadelphia for a family function; I was alone in the house. That right there had the makings for a disaster. But the weekend went off without a hitch (other than that incident involving train signals that didn't work in Macomb County ... and the incident on the campus of Oakland Community College's Farmington Hills campus; suffice to say, "almost" only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and those particular moments).
5 - Receiving acceptance letter to Central Michigan University, February 1982: Yay! Onward and upward!
4 - Graduation: Yay! Onward and outward! (And meeting members of the French Grand Prix team at Meriweather's Restaurant after the ceremony; that was cool, too.)
3 - Eagle Scout, Troop 23, Detroit Area Council, Boy Scouts of America, March 1982: Yay! I was the 104th (next-to-last) Eagle earned under then-scoutmaster Nate Trager; my friend Mark Lawton was #103, and Trager's grandson Jeff was #105.
2 - Lahser Symphony Orchestra @ the Ottawa International Music Festival, Spring 1981: Yeah, going out-of-country for a week or so was a very exciting time. So was meeting girls from Virginia and New York. And, oh yeah, did I mention playing both violin and viola in the same session? And being the "metronome" (so to speak) on viola for the Chamber Orchestra's performance of the Pachelbel Kanon? (Our conductor, Valerie Palmeri, left the stage for our performance; the job of pacing our performance fell to me. Yikes.)
2a - Lahser Symphony Orchestra, State Festival, Spring 1980: Actually, the most cool moment of my orchestra career was the performance of "Night on Bald Mountain" the year before, in the gymnasium of Royal Oak Dondero High School, when we (as a unit) hit the initial climax and stopped playing JUST at the right moment, and the echo reverberated for what seemed like hours. Way cool. We even earned a I+ from one of the judges.
1 - WBFH Marathon, Spring 1982: The team of Dave Eicher, Scott Booth, Paul Gaba and Kelly Kossuth (see how that rhymes?) rode the Starship March-Uv-Dymz into the fundraising arena and helped raise thousands of dollars for the March of Dimes in the battle against birth defects. And $400 of that was earned by me wearing a dress (OK, one of my moms smocks) to school. (I was supposed to wear heels, too, but that proved not to be possible.) Yes, there are photos; no, you may not see them.
Well, that was fun :) Sure beats lamenting over the whole "what the heck has happened since then?" issue.
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