Captain Reverend Mother

My son’s perm belongs in Sixteen Candles, and Anthony Michael Hall could be his stunt double. He is six weeks into his freshman year, and when looking at my high school photos, he cracks up.

We have the same grin, same tilt of the head, though back then my hair reached for the heavens, teased and frozen with Aqua Net. “The higher the hair, the closer to God.” (So why then didn’t more ‘80s teens end up in the ministry?) Those cans were sacred relics of a decade when we tried to hairspray our way into permanence.

Our kitchen table is buried in graph paper filled with trigonometry problems and a half-colored periodic table. My freshman’s knee is still in a leg brace from surgery, so baseball has to wait. Most nights he sighs, shrugs, then keeps at it. Given the load today’s kids carry, the fact that he is hanging in there feels like a win.

This Friday is his first homecoming dance. He plans to go with friends and wear an open-collared shirt, khakis, Adidas Sambas. No date? Sneakers at a dance? Both would have been scandalous in the ’80s. Boys stiffly wore suits and borrowed their father’s neckties. Girls donned Gunny Sax or Jessica McClintock with dyed shoes to match. Couples paired off like Noah’s Ark, parents lined us up for awkward photos, and curfew got stretched exactly one hour in honor of the occasion.

Next week, I return to my hometown for my 40th high school reunion. My classmates and I will tour the building, sit under the Friday night lights, then gather at a local club run by our senior year homecoming queen. I grew up in one place, walked the same halls with the same fifty-or-so kids from kindergarten through high school graduation. My boys will never know that kind of permanence. They are born on opposite sides of the United States and lived in eight different houses at this point, with trees planted along the way as gestures toward a semblance of roots.

I was patently uncool in high school, though I did not realize it. I was well known, riding on my older brother’s coattails. He was two years ahead and wildly popular as a three-sport varsity athlete and top student. I never came close to his orbit. I had circles of friends that shifted with the season. Fellow band geeks, cheerleaders, jocks, nerds, theater kids. Freshman year my best friend was a sophomore. Senior year, some of my closest friends were juniors.

When the Senior Superlatives came out, my name surprisingly ended up under a few glossy headings: Most Likely to Succeed, Most Talented, Most Creative. The titles did not make me cool. I was still the kid hauling a cello to orchestra rehearsal and running student council meetings for an audience that clearly did not care about high school as much as I did. These honorifics just meant I was busy and earnest, more than was fashionable.

Forty years later, I occasionally wonder how many of us lived up to those yearbook predictions, and how many surprised everyone, including ourselves.

Most of my class graduated and stayed nearby. Community college, state schools, a few Ivy leaguers. My criteria for college were simple: get out of the Midwest, be near family, be close to water. That is how I ended up at Tulane. Unbeknownst to me it was party school in a party city, both wasted on me since I did not inherit a drinking gene. I was always the designated driver, which tells you about my social life.

My son is the opposite of uncool. He has aura. Even sidelined from sports, he carries himself like he belongs. I worry about him not joining groups, not building the tidy résumé colleges will expect, being judged for wearing a short sleeve open-collared shirt, yet the current bends toward him. He is cool without trying, which is good, because trying is the fastest way to lose it.

His life’s backdrop is unrecognizable. The biggest drills back in my day were bracing for tornado warnings. His are active shooter lockdowns. My stress came from missed curfews and pop quizzes. His hums in his pocket with every ping and scroll. Today’s kids live with noise we never had to face, and somehow, they keep showing up, perms, sneakers, and all.

High school marks all of us. It hands out friends and heartbreaks and labels we may or may not live up to. Time has the last word. My stories are stored in shoeboxes, fading Polaroids with ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons hanging in the air. His stories will live online forever, tagged and timestamped, ready to resurface at an inconvenient moment.

My generation’s worst choices are not readily searchable. His will be. Then again, we thought Aqua Net would preserve us forever too. Maybe every generation believes their marks are permanent. Maybe that is the point. We live like it matters—bolstered by hairspray or hashtags—because in the moment, it does.