I drove past some graduation night festivities tonight and it made me think of the marvelous time I had in my high school graduation week back in 1984. The day before graduation, a friend who had spent a lot of time at private school came over to my house with some entropy in a little plastic baggie. We got good and confused up in my room and then Mark backed out of the driveway with the door open for some reason and scraped the door off the car on the tree at the head of our driveway. While a circle of neighborhood children watched, we put the door in his trunk and left the shattered auto glass for my parents to ponder when they got home. The partying only slowed a little bit while we stopped by Mark’s house to let his parents know that the piece of metal that until recently functioned quite well as a door could now be found in the trunk and that we would be taking another car. Fortunately, his parents were entertaining and couldn’t really raise a stink about anything. We moved on to Dave’s house where shared our confusion and my incessant giggling began. Somehow, we all got in cars and drove over to Showcase Cinemas on Rte. 5 in West Springfield. I wandered into the first movie that looked good, untroubled by the indecision of the others. I walked around the theatre like 6 times wondering were my friends were and then giving up and sitting down and watching the movie, assuming they were in there somewhere and I would just hook up with them after the movie. Well, I don’t remember a thing about that movie except that it was one of the Star Trek movies. When the movie ended and I found myself in West Springfield without a ride and without friends, I started wandering around the Rt. 5 strip looking for stuff to break and people to mess up. Luckily I found no one. I walked into a hotel looking for a door to kick in or something, but encountered nothing. I decided to walk home along I-91. I stumbled 7 miles along the shoulder of Interstate 91 with cars beeping at me every so often to reassure me that I was indeed an alienated teenager. I was nursing a rage against Dave and figured that I would throw a brick through his living room window when I got back to Longmeadow.
The rage kind of cooled a bit by the time I made it to downtown Springfield at 4:00 in the morning. I called my dad who came to pick me up. He asked me if I had had any “funny stuff” I didn’t think anything was funny at that point, so I said no.
I graduated from high school the next day. While we were all getting ready and milling around the HS lobby, another friend of mine came up to me and said, “I need to adjust your tassel” and fiddled around with something up there. In my helpless fog, I noticed that he had grabbed the little gold colored metal piece that wrapped around my tassel to replace his own that had gone missing. A woman came by five minutes later with another one, but he evidently was willing to sacrifice our friendship to avoid five minutes of uncertainty. I walked through graduation in a daze and went home. When it came time to go to graduation parties, I was too strung out and tired to go. My mom picked this time to come up to my room and grill me about what I was going to do about my life and about school the next year. So I finally broke down had a crying fit. My mom sat there looking at me like she was watching a bug circling the drain.
5:55:02 AM 
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