It’s funny to look back at how cool I thought I was as an eighth-grader. Many of you probably share this feeling with me, the feeling of invincibility as royalty in the hierarchy of middle school. When I first came to Saratoga High School, I, like everybody else, was slapped with a big wet trout of reality. We suddenly descended from kings and queens to court jesters, chants of “Go home, Freshmen!” echoing in our heads.
Coming from Kennedy Middle School, I was extra new. I was lost, and quiet (well, as quiet as I’ve ever been), consumed by self-consciousness and insecurity. Even still this year, one of my truest, closest friends asked me where I had gone to school freshmen year. Indeed, I did breeze through freshmen year rather inconspicuously, going with the flow, careful not to disturb it. To fit in, even I, a habitual slacker, engaged in the popular trend of “studying,” an activity previously unexplored in my life.
Fast-forward four years, and a previously unwelcoming campus now holds memories dear to my heart. Sure, the campus color coordination remains bleak, and comparisons to Alcatraz are as true as ever, but along the way, something has changed. Maybe it was joining the cult that is Saratoga Band, or Wacky Hat Wednesdays, or the sudden school-wide epiphany about my stunning good looks. In hindsight though, while all of these did play a role of some sort, it’s the people along the way that have truly changed me these four years.
After all, as most of you probably know, I haven’t been the best student these couple of years. Poetry homework was put off for games of intense pick-up basketball; studying for finals was put off for furious Blockles matches, finger cramps instead of brain cramps. I don’t remember stoichiometry, and thanks to Alan Menezes, I never needed to know the date of the Boston Tea Party. Even the chain rule, the most basic rule of Calculus, is now fuzzy in my mind.
However, it would be the furthest thing from the truth to say I didn’t learn in high school. It is truly amazing to recount how much simply hanging out with friends, playing the infamous Puerto Rico after school, going on early morning runs, and late-night sleepovers can teach you about others, the world, and most of all, yourself. Among other things, I’ve learned that for all our ambitious plans, it’s often the small unplanned events and details that prove most precious; that doing the right thing doesn’t always feel good; that the 911 challenge is never to be attempted; that horrible things happen when I pick up a trumpet.
Everybody has his or her own metaphor about life, whether it’s comparing life to a tree or a box of chocolates. To me, we’re all blocks of clay in the big game of life. Blocks of clay, in that every person we meet makes an impression on us, leaves his or her own thumbprint, however small. Every once in a while, we’re lucky enough to be blessed by someone whose hands are strong enough to really mold us into something, a definite shape towards the eventual sculpture of ourselves, the person we want to be, the morals and ideals we choose to represent. The longer we stay exposed to air, the longer we go through life, the firmer we become, harder to shape and mold.
As we get ready to move on to college, scattering across the nation like sparks from a firecracker, there is a fear and apprehension in all of us. We will experience life with brand new people never previously met, with few familiar shoulders to lean on, ties to Saratoga not always as close as we want them to be. But think, we are simply moving on to the next batch of friends, teachers, and sculptors. For after all these years, we’ve started to slowly admire the sculptures we’ve created around us, our molding of our peers, and their molding of us. For now, there’s nothing more to do but to move on to new thumbprints. And if we’re lucky, maybe, just maybe, we’ll stumble into the hands of somebody who will knead and push us that much closer to the sculpture we’ll eventually turn out to be.
