Late one night in August, my friend Katie and I took a stroll through our old neighborhood. We turned a corner and saw our high school, looming large and flat-roofed against the sky. It was almost midnight, but the wide open-air hallways were brightly lit against the darkness. We peeked in classroom windows, climbed through a new wing still under construction, inhaled the smell of fresh sawdust and listened in the quiet night for the clang of locker doors.
Perhaps because we’d been away for two years, perhaps because the moon was full, a silence hung between us. I summoned all my collegiate profundity to comment on the passage of time:
“Weird, huh?”
“Yeah,” Katie agreed. “Weird.”
At home that night, I felt a strange aching for the sound of dismissal bells. I yearned for desks lined up in neat rows of five; for clean chalkboards and new pens; for the sight of freshly laundered clothes hung over the chair in my bedroom the night before school began.
My nostalgia puzzled me, for I always dread the start of school. I cringe as I turn the calendar to September, leaving another 10 months between me and the summer to come. I wouldn’t relive high school even in exchange for four years’ Stanford tuition -- so what, exactly, was I longing for?
Those high school classrooms, with their bulletin boards and bright calendars on the walls, promised an order that now seems elusive. At the time, my new backpack and notebooks piled up for the first day of school seemed juvenile, echoing first grade’s new crayons and shiny lunch boxes. But that summer night, they were suddenly reassuring in their tangibility. High school -- once a tangle of insecurities -- seemed simple in hindsight, with dismissal bells ringing every 50 minutes and dinner in our own kitchens every night.
At Stanford, I’m caught between roots and rootlessness, drifting among memories of home and visions of the future. We’re constantly reminded of our transience: we move each year, change our focus each quarter, wonder what we’ll do after graduation. Yesterday’s autumn armor of blank notebooks and new pens seems inconsequential beside huge sandstone arches and the high aspirations of my peers.
Joyce Maynard, in her memoir Looking Back, wonders what changed between first grade and the rest of her education, between “that one ponytail-tossing, skirt-flouncing, hand-waving day and the first day of all the other years.”
I have envied those 6-year-olds, but I know that memory can’t be entirely trusted. In retrospect, our ponytails toss higher, our skirts have an extra flounce and the nervous tremble of our hands is lost in a fearless wave. Memory softens and deludes, giving the clamor of bells the tone of a carillon, transforming a stack of school supplies into a September shrine.
But memory also completes an experience, renders it whole in a way the present won’t allow. In my adolescent eagerness to dash forward, I couldn’t appreciate the permanence and predictability that I sometimes long for now. In another five years, I’ll look back amidst jobs, bills and relationships, and find today’s nostalgia for the “simplicity” of childhood incredibly premature.
I know the rootlessness that I find frustrating now is also the freedom that I’ve striven for, the privilege as well as the price of these years of self-examination. The beauty of intangibility is that when you’ve latched onto nothing, everything remains within reach.
The pages of my notebook are blank, and I am here to start the writing. My hand will shake, and my words will smudge as I write my future. But I suspect that, looking back, this won’t matter. I’ll recall confident scrawls and fresh, blank pages, and long for the serenity of walks with friends on warm August nights.
Christina McCarroll is a junior from Los Altos majoring in English.
