Socializing Stories: The beginning

I’ve been thinking about doing a series on this for awhile, and since I’ve gotten quite a few new readers lately, now seems like a pretty good time to get it going.

I’d like to go into a bit more detail about my social life in the four distinct stages of my life so far: Later elementary, middle school, high school, college. I’ll start today with Later Elementary.

The first conversations I have stored in memory (and thus the first available information I can get about what I was feeling) occured in fourth grade. Fourth grade, around here, is the time that kids stop hanging out with the children of their parent’s friends, and start hanging out with school friends, independently formed, and without direct parental supervision.

When 4th grade rolled around, I wasn’t in a particularly strong social situation. I was the only student in my grade at my school in the district’s gifted program. I was in and out of the hospital and specialist offices for asthma we couldn’t get under control, and I was on steroids for the asthma giving me a lovely moon-shaped face to accompany my ever-expanding waistline. I couldn’t hit a baseball, catch a football, or create a model airplane. I was at the bottom of the ever-confusing children’s social heirarchy.

Down at the bottom with me were two other kids:  Jeanine, who was a vegetarian because her hamster told her meat-eaters burned in hell, and Katrina, who pretended she was a dog.  When fourth grade began, I didn’t know any of these kids.

So, I spent most of my afternoons walking the playground. I’d collect bottle caps and pieces of string and all the other knick-knacks kids drop during play. I’d store them all in a giant hole in a tree which I covered in leaves. But one day, as I was walking to the tree to return a new bottlecap, I saw Katrina standing in front of it. As I walked up, she barked at me.

I was at a loss. What do you do when another student barks at you on the playground? I thought for a minute, and, unable to come up with a better solution, I barked back. This continued for a few minutes and finally she met me return the bottlecap. The next day at lunch, she introduced me to Jeanine, and the “Three Musketeers” was formed.

Now, instead of walking alone at lunch, I walked with these two girls. We discussed books, and television (particularly the shows we sat on the stairs to watch in reflection like South Park), but mostly we talked about social class.

We decided, (or rather, I decided and they followed along, as they were prone to), that the reason no one hing out with us was because they knew we were too good for them. Too smart, too mature, too everything they weren’t. We discarded the negatives (we were less hygenic, socially clueless, and incompetent at sports), and focused only on the things that made us, in our opinions, far better people then those who were glued to the social heirarchy, always fighting to move up one rung on the ladder.Then after school, we’d go back to one of our hoses and play monopoly or scrabble, always competing to see who could show off the strongest vocabulary. Life was good.

But sixth grade rolled around and with sixth grade comes puberty discussions, nervous moms, and the end of boy-girl child friendships.  Thus began a new friendless era in my life, one which I shall share tomorrow.