Down Memory Lane
Anne lent me Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld. I had read and heard a lot about it as a coming of age story of a bright girl feeling slightly out of place in a ritzy New England boarding school. It's swimming in accolades. I spent the last two nights huddled under the covers (brrr) gobbling it up and I'm about halfway through it. I like the writing and it's a good, laid back read. It also throws me into a major memory time warp of my own experience at a ritzy boarding school in New England. I flipped to the author's bio and check to see if she attended one, but there's no mention of it. She hits the target a lot of the time: discussing the fancy-dancy campus, the tiny classes, the assortment of the students, the casual privilege...even the names she gets right. I am impressed.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that I attended such a school. My parents asked me afterward if it was a good experience, and I think that it was. The education was pretty incomparable. I also was plopped there in the Fall of 1990 when I was 13.5 years old and pretty stoopid. I didn't know what had hit me until the first evening there when I realized that my mom had pulled away and that was *it*. What the hell had happened. But I adjusted. I quickly realized that while I was well-traveled, I was not worldly in comparison to my classmates. Cigarettes, booze and boys: what are those? By the time I graduated, I was still pretty green compared to everyone else, but in my four years there I managed to make some good friends. I kind of wish that I had the opportunity to attend the school with the wherewithal that I have *now* because then I would really suck the marrow out of the chance to work with cool professors, attend every speaker that came to campus, and genuinely take advantage of the whole experience. Hindsight is 20/20, though.

After forcing myself to put down the book last night, I tossed around for a while thinking back on some of the sweeter memories. A few that I would like to share:

- My senior year I lucked out and managed to use the rooming lottery to score a seven-person house on campus with close friends. Rather than a rambling dorm, we had a little living room and a little kitchen and it was homey as hell. I somehow managed to secure the position of "house counselor" which meant basically nothing when you're in a tiny house with your friends, but I did get to put that on the old college applications.

-I loved, loved, loved our senior prom. See, since it was all high class, we didn't call it a prom, though. It was called the Last Hurrah (the winter formal was the First Hurrah). Seniors were the only ones allowed to attend and we were all required to take four weeks of ballroom dance lessons. My date was a tall, sweetly dorky crew dude named Dan who was my dancing partner during one of those lessons. We struggled through awkward reinditions of the foxtrot and the cha cha. I was not the grace monkey that I'm sure you all thought I would be. I didn't see the point of the dance lessons until the day of the dance. We walked into the candle lit, regally wooden dining hall and discovered that a big brass band that had driven in from New York had set up. They proceeded to rock our socks off. Dan and I danced the entire three hours. I only knew two basic steps, but it is hands down the best time I've ever had a dance.

-The campus was gorgeous. Des can attest to this since as it happens she spent her summers at the same school since her dad taught physics there to science scholars. Two buildings designed by I.M. Pei. The arts building was one of his, and it was walled with glass. Senior year I took a life drawing class there complete with a nude model. That was pretty great and I wish that I still had some of those charcoal drawings because, let's face it, the female body is pretty awesome to draw.

-One particular tradition I enjoyed was something called Garden Party that was held in the last week of school. During this, each senior girl invited one favored teacher and one favored junior girl to attend a tea party kind of thing that was held on one of the lawns. You exchanged bouquets with your invitees and dressed in your summer dress best. I took my favorite teacher (Mrs. Temple from calculus) and a sweet junior named Maeve who I did a community arts program with. It was lovely. (Maeve is a great name, now that I think about it, by the way).

-The spring of my senior year several of my friends in my house went off for a two-month long exchange to a Navajo reservation (See? If I were smart, I would have done that too). I was able to form some friendships with the Navajo students who came over, lived in the house I was in, and were in class with me. They invited me and a couple of others over to a feast of traditional Navajo food in our dorm advisor's house and then we all watched "The X-Files. " Navajo flat bread: you had me at hello. During that time, someone from the New York Times did an article about the exchange. Through one of my extracurriculars, they hooked the reporter up to me to represent the boarding school voice since my peers were off on their exchange. My dad was overseas when one of his colleagues showed the article to him with a "Isn't this your kid?" I sounded like an asshole and the article was on the front page (slow news day, I guess). But another lesson learned.

-My all time favorite adviser was a young English teacher named Ms. P from my junior year. She lived in a absurdly small apartment on my dorm floor and allowed some of us to watch SNL on her mini TV on her kitchen counter on Saturday nights. One night she drove four of us to New Haven to eat delicious veggie food at Claire's and then go and see the Nutcracker. Ms. P probably was younger than I am now, and I still have a warm place in my heart for her. Since she was new she didn't develop the crustiness that more seasoned boarding school teachers held. At one point she was going running with two other youngish teachers on campus and left a couple of us in her apartment to watch skating on her TV. I still remember the looks those other teachers had ("what the hell are you having these students in your place for?"). But I still love her for trusting us and letting us share a little piece of *someone's* home on a Sunday morning. I think she might have been a little lonesome being young and far away from her family, but that lonesomeness allowed her some openness to connect. I believe that if we were the same age we would have had a grand friendship.

Okay, that is a lot of pontificating for one post. But it's all to say that despite the struggles of high school, I emerged with an overall positive experience. And that Prep is good.