I passed Donald and Robby from the chess club, greeted them and almost ran over Hank, one of the school's cheerleaders, who would become more than an acquaintance. The number of old friends and new faces I encountered in walking the halls was remarkable. The noisy chattering of this adolescent comity was wonderful and comforting, especially on the first day of school. I loved walking the halls in this manner. The air was charged with magical possibilities. What other time of life could equal this? At what other time of life could we see so much packed into a single day of an adolescent and his high school? Perhaps the coming War.
Everyone knows about that time of year when the fall semester begins and each tingles with anticipation. It is a time for walking in the hall's before class and talking and searching for a pair of inviting eyes, for writing notes, for long slow walks after school, football games, and after-school dances in the girl's gym. (There hadn't been any dances at the school for years, and this fall they would begin.) How exciting. Everything was exciting. I was going to be part of all the grandeur of youth. Being a teenager, and being able to go to high school was something all of us gloried in. In our minds it lifted us from the mundane into the transcendental.
Although I hadn't, many of my classmates came from immigrant parents or grandparents. Many of them felt that the old country ways did not serve them well enough. They wanted to become what it is to be an American. To be an American was to walk in bright light, do exciting, relevant things, to aspire, to fly.