Study Hall...Silence Please!

Last night I received an email message from a friend from high school who has been living on the West Coast for some time now. Somehow, we've become a bit closer over this past year and a half, exchanging emails and keeping up on some of the things going on in our lives.

In this most recent email, she had some questions about an upcoming class reunion, and if in fact, there was going to be one. She had stumbled upon a message posted on a site from one of our classmates who now lives in Reno. In our subsequent email exchange, I informed her that I had emailed this other classmate, and that the reunion would most likely not be held this fall, but would be in the spring, thus making it a 41st Year Reunion. In some way, she was relieved....because in her preparation, she had been eating only radishes for 3 months and had only lost 3 pounds. Now, she was heading to the kitchen to open one of the giant bags of Pirate of the Caribbean peanut M&Ms!

This most recent exchange reminded me of some of the antics we did back when we were in high school. One incident that I always remember was when a bunch of us had been scheduled for study hall in the cafeteria during the same period near the end of the day. The teachers monitoring that period were newer underclass teachers, so didn't really know any of us. The cafeteria had padded seats on both sides with tables and wooden cafe style chairs, and in the middle of the room, the tables were arranged in 3 or 4 long rows. Each student was spaced far enough apart to "discourage" talking.

We decided that to sit together we would have to change our last names so that each one began with a particular letter. One friend had already given his last name and it began with 'S', so by default, we decided on 'S'. Each of us kept our own last name, but just changed the first letter to an 'S'. Talk about being obvious! Well....the monitors didn't blink, and we all ended up sitting together. As the days went on, we would sit together and talk. Hey! We were upperclassmen! And, one by one we were separated because we were talking. But the fun part was that students who were 'disciplined', were made to sit over at the side of the cafeteria on the padded seating. And one by one, we were all re-united in the "detention" area...and were able to chat away! Ah, life was simple and sweet!