High School Revisted

Jacob Tucker, feature editor

Homecoming is an event that most college students either forget about or are too busy keeping up with their hectic college lives to keep up with something so trivial.

I did what many students do when they contemplate attending this monumentous event. I looked at the numerous reasons for going to the event.

If you are like me, you never keep up with the class that you graduated with.  This is an ample opportunity to get in touch with those long lost friends.

You look forward to seeing your best friends and want to ask them how their lives have been since the last time you saw them. 

These times are really the ones that define the homecoming game.  No one really watches the football game, because they just sit and reminisce about the good old days.  The sour notes of the band are blocked out as you listen intently to the tales that they have to tell of life after high school.

Then, there are the people who always made fun of you in high school.  These are the ones who you always wished the worst of.  When you get home, you find the first classmate you see and ask, “So, is Jimmy in jail yet?”  But you receive a clueless shoulder shrug. 

These bullies sometimes have a change of heart.  However most of the time they are still the same.  They look at you and give a glance that slightly resembles a lion salivating over their newfound meal.  The bully allows you to begin a conversation among a large group of people.  Then, they strike.

They abruptly interrupt your conversation with an embarrassing story from the good ol’ days.  You try to play it cool in the beginning, but before the bully is done with the first sentence you are already bright red. 

Just as you find a reason to abandon that group, ‘the teacher’ walks up.  Everyone has had ‘the teacher.’  He or she is the one who made your high school career a living hell.  In my case, they attempted to wedge themselves into every aspect of my life. 

The conversation with ‘the teacher’ is fairly mellow in the beginning.  They ask about your grades, if you are getting up on time, how the job is, or many other numerous general questions.  This is where most people stop with the conversation, but not ‘the teacher.’ 

He or she continues to delve into your college life as much as he or she can in an effort to pry some sort of incriminating evidence from your lips.  If he or she succeeds, ‘the teacher’ will be armed with this prize as they enter the Teacher’s Lounge on the following Monday to reveal the latest gossip from homecoming week.

When you finally get a break in conversations, you divert your attention to the football game.  You think, “Man, we were a lot bigger than that during football, right?” 

A few years ago, my school dropped down a classification to six-man, and football in Paducah has never been the same.  There is now no way that I, or anyone else, can compare to this ‘better’ form of football.  I was used to the 100-yard field and 22, now 12, raging teenagers on the turf.

A cracked note in your favorite stand song re-directs your attention back to the far side of the stands where the band is sitting.  Former band geeks, like myself, are allowed to take a stab at playing their old instrument. 

After looking though the music folder you discover that the songs that you once loved such as “Barbara Ann”, “Eye of the Tiger” and Darth Vader’s “Imperial March” have all been replaced with dumbed down versions that never reach the higher notes.  When this is discovered, you pack-up the instrument that you have and sit back down.

Another thing that people and classmates from your hometown are looking for is a new girlfriend.  This is as much of an event than the game itself. 

As soon as you step out of your vehicle, you are bombarded with a hail of questions.  Since the majority of questions are coming from your friends, they are not very hard to answer.  The question that you are waiting for is the one about the ex-girlfriend from your hometown. 

You begin to wonder if she has seen her successor.  Is she jealous of her hair, angry that she is with you, or does she even care?  These questions drown out all of the others that have been asked, and you now have one purpose.  That purpose is to look and act even happier than you were in your previous relationship, even if you are truly happy. 

If you succeed in your efforts, you have made your homecoming a happy one and completely miserable for others.  I am not trying to be a mean person.  Believe me I am far from it.  But is this not what most guys do when they bring their girlfriends home with them?  It is our lot in life to make the other person jealous.

As I ran these thoughts through my mind, I began to realize that homecoming really isn’t about the game, all of the annoying people from high school, or the band in the stands. 

It is about re-kindling the memories that you shared on that small or large campus that you were on.  Remembering all of the funny little stories that happened in that tiny town, you slowly begin to blow the dust from those forgotten files of your mind, and remember that it really wasn’t all that bad.

So, go to your homecoming game and see all of those people you so fondly miss.  Who knows, maybe you’ll get lucky and one of those bullies really got what was coming to them.