COLUMN Citizenship Skills

From Jarmil Smith's "Invisible Man," Fall '95 Driving onto the familiar sweep of blacktop last week, with the windshield wipers squeaking intermittently to keep up with a cool drizzle, I was struck how normal everything still seemed. Normal is relative, I realize, but what accounts for the fact that my eyes refused to stop scanning the road for administrators eager to nab students returning from unauthorized off-campus lunches in cars that had been driven to school against the rules in the first place? My feelings of uneasiness only increased as I parked the car near the auditorium entrance, as I had so many times before, far from the sight of those same administrators. Walking toward the beige-and-terracotta building that sprawled out in the shadow of the hill where my field hockey team had run innumerable wind sprints on unbearably humid August days, I could sense my heart beating a little faster than it should have. Why the apprehension? "Visitors must register upon entering building," declared a decal on the first of two heavy glass doors that stood between me and the auditorium lobby where friends had waited for me after every concert, spring musical and awards assembly. Ignoring the warning, I took a deep breath and stepped inside, not recognizing the teacher monitoring the area and hoping that in my Penn jacket, I wouldn't be asked for a hall pass. For the moment, my prayers were answered. Yet I remained uncomfortable about barging into classes as I had seen so many alumni do over the years, because I already felt like I didn't belong in this cavernous place that had been my home for four years of classes, practices, rehearsals, closed-circuit television broadcasts and late-night newspaper layout sessions. Despite an overabundance of fluorescent light, the butter yellow hallways appeared dingy. Crowds of students were spilling from classrooms into the corridors and rushing so as not to be tardy for their next class, but the air didn't move. Desks and chairs seemed smaller than I remembered them, as did the students lounging in the Commons area and crammed into the cafeteria. Even the ceilings were lower. I felt as if some formaldehyde-like force was keeping faculty and physical plant frozen in 1993, my senior year, but allowing me to moveEon. It was disturbing, but in truth, not the case. After all, the school day has been restructured once since I left, and next year will witness the implementation of 80-minute flexible blocks instead of traditional 40 or 45 minute periods. My twelfth grade English teacher is constructing a World Wide Web homepage for the school district. My class had nine valedictorians, all with straight As, a feat no one expected to be repeated anytime soon. But this year, there are 10 students of our caliber, now called simply "commencement speakers." Less visible changes were evident, too. My choral director, who staunchly resisted getting a pair of sorely needed glasses in 1993 because wearing them would mean he had acknowledged his age, is going gray. The French teacher who worked with me on an independent study when I was a senior thought I'd only been in college one year, and did a double-take when I corrected him. My chemistry teacher took a sabbatical after his wife lost a lengthy battle with cancer last winter, and my calculus teacher is on leave, too, trying to decide whether she's ready to give up cube roots and retire, as my physics teacher has already done. Strolling past the display cases strategically placed in each hallway because there weren't many teachers left for me to visit, it became obvious that although I've only been gone two years, my high school is not the same place I left behind on that starry June night in 1993 when my white cap flew into the inky blackness with 256 other red and white ones, under the football stadium's gazillion candlepower lights. I can no longer identify the majority of the faces smiling out from cast pictures hanging near the auditorium or plaques tacked to the wall in the Hall of Champions. When next year's senior class graduates, not one remaining member of the student body will have personal memories of the Class of 1993 -- only secondhand accounts of who we were and what we did during the school's Blue Ribbon year. There will be reunions, I know, gatherings filled with gossip and small talk and pretended politeness among people who spent the better part of four years as enemies, or who were friends until significant others were recycled too many times. The parchment with fancy script and official seals and signatures, the plaques, with shiny brass insets -- all are ours to keep, like consolation prizes given to game show contestants, hanging in childhood bedrooms as a reminder of where we've been. But the endless afternoons spent in someone's driveway turning a station wagon into a mobile jukebox for Homecoming are gone forever. junior History - Pittsburgh