While my mother had prepared me well for the cafeteria style lunch set up, (she took me to Bonanza Restaurant a few times that prior summer because I was hysterical thinking I would not know how to buy lunch as it involved pushing a tray along and simultaneously choosing, selecting, and getting a food item to put on the tray and hopefully, one I liked) I found myself completely dumbfounded in homeroom first thing when handed a lock for my locker.
I tried to see what everyone else was doing as they looked at the white paper scrap covered in numbers and then twisted the dial on the cold metal lock one way and then the next. I truly had never seen a numbered lock before and I could barely handle the wispy little metal key for the lock on my pink plastic covered diary. So after a while of mimicking the humans, I decided to grab on to the best solution possible, I lied to my homeroom teacher. I told him emphatically that my lock was stuck and try as I might I just could not get it to open. I handed him my lock and watched so intently that one of my eyes practically shot out of its socket. I memorized how to turn a dial lock like my skinny little awkward life depended on it.
The one thing I do remember from that first day of public high school, in addition to my lock fiasco, (which I probably had a few kneeling Hail Marys to absolve the lying) is a very unthoughtful incident on the part of the biology teacher (who called me Elena for five months until I had the courage to barely whisper to her to correct her, "Um, ...well., excuse me...um...my name..yes...well..um...my name is actually..um..I think..yes...my name is ..Aileen." "Oh, thank you Eileen. You can sit down now."). On the very first day of high school, with a class of freshman and sophomores in a town that integrates a slew of Air Force students each year, this biology teacher came out of the gate with this one, "Now everyone get a lab partner that you will be working with all year."
Okay, so I was just barely breathing and still trying to decipher if I wet my pants trying to get from home room to my first class and this woman casually set me up to fail as I didn't know one person in the room, and yet I had to sheepishly command the friendship and loyalty of one kindred spirit to have and to hold, to dissect and record, til that year do us part. Well, commanding didn't happen, sheepishly or otherwise, and after all the popular kids found each other, and then the next less popular kids found each other, and that declining social status pairing went on for about twenty minutes, I sat alone surrounded by a sea of happy smiling biology couples, pearly whites beaming a reflection off of the shiny black lab counters. Then she just had to bark out, "Does anybody NOT have a partner?" I slowly raised my hand. A kid from the end of my counter slowly raised his hand. "Okay, you two, be partners." And that was the pairing of Ken and Aileen, a friendship that lasted for four years, and into college together, and remains active thirty years later.
So, A First Day to Begin can be fraught with some nerves, and some awkwardness, and some panic. If one prepares slightly, asks for help, and allows the magic of good friendship pairing to happen, in no time one just may be surrounded by laughter, confidence, and the knowing that, once again, A First Day to Begin has been survived.
