What lessons from high school do you carry with you?

Kathy Morgan, Fairmont West Class of 1977, 1959-2013

I don’t know how it was in your high school, but at the large public high school in the southern Ohio suburb where I grew up, the spring day the yearbook came out was one of the best days of the whole school year.

We stood in line to claim our pre-paid copy, then spent the rest of the day — I guess we also went to class? — poring over each page, looking to see who was featured in every blurry black-and-white photo.

Then, the best part: Asking other people in the class to sign your yearbook. Working up the nerve to ask the guy you’d always had a crush on to write something … and waiting to see if he signed it “love.” (At least in the restrained Midwestern world I grew up in, signing anything “love” was a HUGE deal. I’m not sure it ever happened.) Wondering if your best girlfriend from junior high would say something nice, even though you were no longer close. Hoping your field hockey teammates wouldn’t recount anything too embarrassing, because we all read each other’s yearbook signatures and talked about them endlessly.

It was a great way to begin to close out our senior year.

I should tell you now that I’m not even sure where my high school yearbook is, and am not really close to anyone from my high school class. I knew early on that I would leave town to go to college if I could — and I pretty much never looked back. It’s not that I didn’t like where I grew up, I just didn’t see a future for myself there. I’m sorry to say that I lost touch with most of my high school friends and teammates in my rush toward something far from Ohio.

That is, until Steve, who’d lived up the street from me when we were kids, launched a class Facebook page and we began to reconnect on social media.

While I haven’t made it back for any of the reunions, I love seeing pictures of my classmates now and following along with what they’re doing. I admit that I don’t recognize a lot of faces whose names are (at least a little) familiar. I hadn’t realized how long I’d been gone, or how far away from those high school days I am.

Then I noticed that one of our classmates has begun gathering obituaries; it’s sobering to see that there are dozens of them. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised — we graduated high school in 1977, and there were more than 500 people in our class — but I’ve looked at that page over and over.

It was the fact that she used pictures from our senior yearbook that really got me.

Clicking through those black-and-white portraits was like going right back to the cafeteria on the day we all got our yearbooks; I remembered those people as if I’d seen them yesterday.

There was Jeff, the friendly, funny guy who was always around. And Terry, another great guy who was in a lot of my classes. Did I go to a dance with him? Joe was the captain of the football team, though I didn’t know him well; he had apparently been struggling with health issues for a while before he died. Dan, who I know I dated for a minute. Janine. Brenda. Mike. Wow.

But the picture that stopped me cold was of Kathy, wearing a classic ‘70s look in her yearbook portrait — a scarf side-tied around her neck and wire-rimmed aviator glasses. The look on her face is happy and hopeful; it’s a great picture (above). Kathy was one of the goalies on our field hockey team and she was in many of my classes. We weren’t close friends, but in the way that friendships were forged back then, before social media — and, let’s face it, in a fairly homogenous community — we did lots of things together.

Where had she lived since those Fairmont West days? Had she been happy? What lessons she learned in high school had she always carried with her?

Come to think of it, what lessons from high school have I always carried with me?

I know now how lucky I was to grow up in a place where excellent public schools were the default choice for nearly everyone, and funded well enough to offer an array of AP courses, terrific teachers (for the most part), the chance to play the violin, sing in the choir and, of course, to play field hockey well enough to want to take it to the next level.

What I didn’t know until much later is that being part of my high school class gave me the confidence to begin to think I really could be whatever I wanted to be. It was the launching pad for everything that came later.

I know I’m sanding off many of the rough edges of high school as I look wistfully at these pictures. In addition to the rough-and-tumble of high school social groups, early dating, reading Shakespeare for the first time and learning algebra, many of us dealt with divorce, dysfunctional parents, alcohol and drugs.

There were lots of things I simply didn’t know about, including my own privilege. And there were plenty of taboo subjects. Probably most of my classmates couldn’t imagine that I would eventually discover my dad was gay, and still don’t know that he was one of the earliest AIDS deaths in our part of the world, even as he still lived in the house where I grew up.

Actually, until it happened, I couldn’t have imagined it, either.

And that might be the biggest gift of growing up in — and eventually leaving — a sheltered, plain vanilla place and childhood like mine. I knew I was loved, and lucky. However it happened, I also learned the resiliency and open-mindedness to understand the different people and different worlds I would encounter throughout the rest of my life.

What I see now is that those people in the black-and-white pictures were a big part of that.

Thanks, friends.