Hoedown at Jones Junior High

By Vance Meyer

Halloween is not known as a time for personal reflection.  But for me this year, it turned out to be thanks to my high-school sophomore.

Earlier in the week I delivered him to school ahead of time, knowing that he would need a few extra minutes to inflate his seven-foot pickle costume for a campus-wide dress-up day.  As he gathered his things together in the cabin of my truck, more kids began to parade across the manicured campus, and I noticed that none of them were wearing costumes.

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

"Why would I do that?" he shot back.  Noah was "on" to my attempt to protect him from potential embarrassment or ridicule, and it pressed his button.

Ironically, one of the things I love and envy about Noah is that he was born with an allergy to worries or hangups about reputation and conformance.  In fact, I guarantee you he would relish (sorry) the opportunity to tower over his uniformed classmates as the school pickle. 

"What's your deal, dad?" he rightfully asked.  It was a question that I thought about all the way home, including during my usual breakfast stop at Metro Diner...

... It was the autumn of America's Bicentennial, 1976.  Only a few months earlier I had transferred to Jones Junior High School from a start-up religious academy on the same long avenue.  My parents wanted me to remain at Temple Christian School through graduation, but being forced to stand at attention while a stone-faced headmaster read monotone sermons was not my cup of tea, and I was miserable.

I can't remember the precipitating occasion -- perhaps it was Halloween -- but on the daily 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 weeks since I had tried out for the school basketball team.  There, within 10 minutes, the coaching staff had cordoned me off with a group of tryouts in black socks and concert T-shirts, who did tricks like catapulting a layup over the backboard and allowing a loose ball to roll across the gym floor into the path a swan-like scrimmage featuring players who were somehow already wearing Jones jerseys.

Anyhow, Tuesday came quickly and 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 married sister, Carol, had spent the night with us and she, being the festive person that she is, found an old yellow handkerchief to accessorize my jeans.  Before I had left the house, she also decided that it would really put the cherry on the sundae if she dotted freckles on my cheeks with eyeliner.

At the time I was carpooling with two ninth-grade girls. (Jones was a 7th, 8th and 9th grade school.)  One of the girl's mothers, our chauffeur, made a big fuss about how great I looked in my costume, while my own mother and sister stood proudly at the gate.  The two girls, I noticed, were not wearing costumes, and I hoped that I had perhaps not understood that Hoedown Day was for 7th and 8th graders only,  

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

There, before me, were at least one hundred 12- to 14-year-old schoolmates, divided into friend groups of all sizes, who had taken Hoedown Day far less seriously than Carol and I had.  I did quickly take note of three girls who were wearing straw hats just like mine.

As you can imagine, the laughter began to build, 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 the freshman girls 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 I'm pretty sure 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. 

"WHAT THE HELL!" he emoted through ventriloquist lips.

"I know.  GOD," I sort of half-whispered with my eyes closed tightly.

For a fleeting moment 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," said Stew. (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 implementing Stew's excellent instruction, relying too heavily on a dispenser of pink hand soap and a large roll of brown paper towels, which I had borrowed from an adjoining janitor's closet.

As the day wore on, things didn't get better.  Not worse.  Just not better.  By the time the bell rang at 3:30, I still was not sure if I had survived the encounter 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 as not inconspicuously tucked under my arm, from the view of students passing by in their parents' cars.

We turned left at Bradford Street and within 20 minutes were at Stew's corner house, which had been built by his great grandfather, Naldo (Pop) Elzroth.  

On the screened-in front porch, Stew helped take my attention off the worst day of my life by showing me the two newest additions to his beer can collection.  One of them, as I recall, 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 Pop had left behind and played "Smoke on the Water" on its two remaining strings for an hour before I had to go home.

Stewart now consults with corporations on how to motivate their workers while also teaching courses in the management school at Purdue University.  He was the best man at my wedding and just last year made several hour-long trips to DePauw University, also in Indiana, to be sure my son, Samuel, was getting along o.k. in his freshman year...

... Noah, it turned out, was definitely not the only student who dressed up that day at school -- not that he gave a rat's behind either way.  But his simple, probing question had afforded me the opportunity to walk down a pretty awesome memory lane over pancakes.  

Now that our rotting pumpkin is R.I.P. in a local landfill -- and the rubber bats and cotton spiderwebs have returned to their 50-week hibernation in a Tupperware crate -- I feel unusually blessed to have had people throughout my life who have supported me through awkward periods.  And I have recommitted myself to cheering on my inflatable pickle, or whatever he chooses to be next Halloween, without burdening him with my own unwarranted insecurities or denying him some truly memorable life experiences.


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.