i have a very strong memory of standing
at schmitz’s gas station in my cap and gown
thinking this is the end of a great deed: high
school, thank christ, is over.
juvenile deeds and people thinking they’re so
clever, feeling so terribly earnest and so
callous, either deathly dull or alien,
this grinding routine day in and day out:
a red day, a blue day, sixth period, the whole complex
of a steadily atrophied childhood.
i remember people saying this: that one day you’ll
miss these days and wish you could return. but i
am learning that this is a pious fable occluding a
truth too hard to introduce to kids so young:
high school never ever ever ends.
there is an illusion of leaving adolescence
to enter in some stable place called adulthood
where we can transcend the noise of misguided and
hostile people. we make more money and say we learn lessons
but i think our hearts learn less than we think.
or maybe i should say nothing is deleted, so that once we
wash ashore at seventy-five or eighty
at the very moment we want most to fade
along our own course into the nighttime
the battle calls against those very things,
complacency never being a virtue given to us, not
even after we go.
rest is fine but the world must
not be allowed to get small before death. right up to the last
wrestle with the youth in ourselves and demand its blessing
even in senility till morning: keep looking at the daylight and
seeing life and the trackless mysteries of the night and the
deeper ones of people: high school never ever ever ends.
we never really ever get that smart
no matter what success we think we earned.
