Many Years of Bossier

Leaving a Cope Middle School football game the other night in the Airline High Stadium to head toward the high school, it crossed my mind how lucky I was. An Airline graduate myself, I was one of those post high school groupies that drove wistfully by and remembered the fun filled, friend filled days of yore. Now, here I was, lucky enough to once more be climbing those stadium stairs, once more hear the Big Blue Band trumpet out the Fight Song, and once more have a reason to race from C Wing To E Wing, finding classrooms on parents’ night.

Some people leave high school and never enter the building again, or even that state again. Yet here I was, walking the sidewalk against the band wing in the beautiful fall weather, with the stadium lights behind me, and my daughter’s band blasting away. Life is good.

Having now entered that After Forty generation, many of my old school friends are flung far and wide across the globe. Many left right after graduation to forge a new life in new and exciting places. I stayed behind. And for awhile I can remember pushing a buggy through Brookshire’s parking lot and thinking that I had pushed that same buggy through that same parking lot since I was six years old. What was I?

Now I know what I am. I am the person that grieved Mr. Carson retiring from that same Brookshire’s because I had seen him standing behind that glass since I was a little girl. He was who I went to when Brookshire’s quit carrying my favorite Blue Bell flavor. He would command Elaine, the office manager, to get on the phone and find it for me. He knew me, my parents, and my children. I worked for him at 16 and then my son did when he was 16. Brookshire’s was as big a part of growing up as Airline High.

I am the person that loves seeing my daughter play with the daughters of the girls that played with me. As we all stand in Concessions at Cope Middle and compare what our girls are doing against what we did, that feeling of permanence is palpable. It is wonderful. Girls, now women, that I haven’t seen in years, now walk in weekly and talk to me as if we just got up from the lunch table yesterday. Friendship is timeless, and it touches our children through us.

I am the person that felt joy when my daughter got Mrs Miller as her teacher. Not only had Mrs Miller been the epitome of kindness and learning to my sons, but her mother had been the epitome of kindness and learning to me. As I lean over my daughter’s shoulder and discuss the plight of Rikki Tikki Tavi to answer the questions Mrs Miller sent home, I tell my daughter how her teacher’s mother leaned over my own shoulder and poked a finger at an important sentence in my lesson that would help me with a question I was fumbling with. How her mother had jumped up in anger to confront a coach that had hurt my feelings and made me cry. How her mother is no longer with us, but will always be in my heart and her kindness had reached right through a generation and through her daughter to show kindness to my own.

So my friends return at Christmastime and at reunion time and tell of their adventures from those far away places, and I no longer feel I am the one that was too boring and stayed behind. Because I get to walk the sidewalks of Airline High once again, I get to munch popcorn with those same girls again, and I get to vividly remember all the people I loved once again every day.

And not only do I have the pleasure of buying my catfood and the manager calling out a hello while updating me on her daughter in Baton Rouge, but I know that when my friends are in those far away cities full of people they don’t even know, they don’t get the very best part of all. Getting pulled over by a policeman when zooming down the road in your very own hometown, is not just flashing blue lights of a stranger making you stop on a big city road. But the officer that gets out is the little brother of your best friend from long ago. And he walks up to your car, slaps you on the back, gives you a hug and a kiss, asks about the kids, and puts you totally at ease before those long familiar words. "License and registration, please. Do you know how fast you were going?????"