The roasting

This post was going to be a light roast, a rant against my former high school classmates. I had hoped to be benign in objective and made it an angry outburst. At the end I wussed out, I guess deep inside the memories of resentment and contempt I do feel some sort of appreciation for these people.

It so happens that today I have a high school reunion. Though I never graduated at this school I spent several years with many of the people that I will see tonight. I can’t say that I am excited to see everyone. They constitute a model of a place where I never fit, a place where I blamed myself for not being able to fit; a place of intolerance, violence and ignorance that today –in retrospective- shouldn’t have mattered to fit in. I entered this school because they promised us that it would become a government model school for the region. It was located on the top of a mountain next to a mental hospital and the school facilities used to be part of it. The children chosen to start the school were from the surrounding public elementary schools. I couldn’t say that within all my classmates there was an economic mix, save a few exceptions, we were all poor children. This shouldn’t come as a problem except that along with poverty in this city, children brought to school their problems at home and acted according to their intolerant environments. I must say I disliked the environment yet I was unable to assimilate well the situation until the last year before I left for another school. I anticipate to the reader that the school never became a model school, it got robbed of all its possessions, and the best talented teachers left replaced by political quotas in a few years. As far as I know only few reached college, a good number got married right out, and most have never left the 20 mile radius that they lived in all their lives.

Some I still keep in touch and have proven to be good friends. Others I didn’t know too well, and frankly wouldn’t care to remember. Some of those I kept in touch and turned out to be real disappointments I feel sorry for. I hope all these people I shared time in school do well, that they see a better future for themselves and their children. Albeit few, I do have good memories as well.

I guess we will only know for sure tomorrow if tonight will be part of the good memories, or the bad ones pile.

Addendum: Last Friday night will be on the pile of good memories.