Hoedown at Jones Junior High

By Vance Meyer

Most people probably don’t think of Halloween as an opportunity for personal reflection.  For me this year, it was.

Earlier in the week I driven my high-school sophomore to school ahead of schedule, knowing that he would need a few extra minutes to inflate his seven-foot pickle costume for a campus-wide Halloween dress-up day.  

As Noah gathered up his costume and books from the front seat of my truck, kids began to parade across the manicured campus, and I noticed that none were wearing costumes.

"Hey, pal.  You want to sit here a while to see what the other kids are wearing?,” I offered.

"Why would I do that?" Noah shot back. 

One of the things I envy about Noah is that he was born with an allergy to hangups about reputation and conformity.  In fact, he would relish the opportunity to tower over his uniformed classmates as a pickle.

"What's your deal, dad?" he kept pressing.  It’s actually a good question, I thought to myself…

... It was the autumn of 1976.  Only a few months earlier I had transferred to Jones Junior High School from a religious academy a few miles away.  My parents wanted me to remain at Temple Christian School through graduation, but being forced to stand at attention while a headmaster read monotone sermons was not my thing, and I begged them to let me out.

On the daily Jones intercom announcements the vice principal informed everyone that next Tuesday would be "Hoedown Day," a time for us to put on our most creative country attire.  

We didn't do this kind of thing at Temple Christian, and I didn't want to screw it up.  It had only been a couple of days since I had tried out for the Jones basketball team.  There, within 10 minutes, the coaching staff had cordoned me off with a group of other tryouts in black socks and concert T-shirts, while guys who were mysteriously already wearing Jones jerseys did layups on the other end of the floor.

Hoedown Day came quickly.  My mother had bought me a pair of bib overalls and a large straw hat, the kind they wore on "Hee-Haw."  For some reason, my adult sister, Carol, had spent the night with us and found an old yellow handkerchief to accessorize my jeans.  Before  I had left the house, she decided it would be darling if she dotted freckles on my cheeks with eyeliner.

At the time I was carpooling with two ninth-grade girls in a station wagon driven by a mom.  Our chauffeur made a big fuss about how adorable I looked in costume, while my mother and sister stood proudly at the gate.  The two girls, I noticed, were not wearing costumes. 

All the way to school, the car was quiet, and it wasn't lost on me that my female companions remained inside the vehicle as I opened the door and stepped onto the concrete plaza at Jones.

There, before me, were at least one hundred 12- to 14-year-old schoolmates, divided into friend groups, who had taken Hoedown Day far less seriously than Carol and I had.  I was relieved to see that three kids were wearing straw hats like mine, until I realized they were girls.

Laughter began to build across the plaza, first on an intra-clique basis and then collectively.  Out of nowhere I saw my best friend, Stew Bauserman, race through the crowd in my direction as my carpool mates were still pretending to be rummaging through their backpacks in the back seat.  

Stew was a short, muscular dude, a member of the football team, and the only guy at Jones with a full complement of chest hair and a very respectable goatee.  I was immediately reassured and even grateful that he would choose to be anywhere near me in that moment. 

Stew kept moving quickly toward me.  His eyes were wide as quarters and he was talking like a ventriloquist.

"WHAT THE HELL!" he said in a high, breathy voice.

"I know!,” I let out.  My eyes were closed.  “God.”

I wished I was back at Temple Christian where I could at least slip into the chapel and pray this crisis away.

"Look, it's fine," Stew sought to assure me.  (I could tell he was taking command of the situation.)  "Just get in there and wash that shit off your face as soon as they open the doors."

I nearly bruised my cheeks and forehead implementing Stew's excellent plan, relying too heavily on a dispenser of pink hand soap and a large roll of brown paper towels I had lifted from the adjoining janitor's closet.

As the day wore on, things didn't get better or worse.  By the time the bell rang at 3:30, I was still not sure if I had survived Hoedown Day and wondered if my re-entry to the Marion, Indiana public-school system had come to a tragic early conclusion.

It was a fairly nice afternoon, and Stew and I decided to walk to his house.  There was no sidewalk along the half-mile stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue, so Stew took the street-side to help block the straw hat, which was partially tucked under my arm.

We turned left at Bradford Street and within 20 minutes we were at Stew's corner house.

On the screened-in front porch, Stew helped take my mind off the worst day of my life by showing me the two newest additions to his beer can collection.  One of them still had its tab and was filled with Billy Beer, a serious find if he kept it for 20 or 30 more years.  Then we pulled out an old electric guitar that Stew’s grandfather had bequeathed to him and played "Smoke on the Water" on its only two strings for an hour before I had to go home.

... Noah, it turned out, was definitely not the only student who dressed up that day at school -- not that he gave a rat's ass either way.  

But his question had afforded me the opportunity to process Hoedown Day over IHOP pancakes between his school and my office, where I recommitted myself to cheering on my inflatable pickle, or whatever he chooses to be in the future, without judging or burdening him ever again with my own insecurities.

(Stew now consults with corporations on how to motivate their workers and teaches courses in the management school at Purdue University.  He was the best man in my wedding and still my best friend.)

Vance Meyer is a former corporate communication and marketing professional whose blog, myTMI, contains short stories about his life which he hopes that his boys, Samuel and Noah, will enjoy in their later years.