Friday Afternoons

North Callaway R-1 high school in Kingdom City graduated ninety-three students in 1995. The cinderblock and brick building faces northwest along a flat stretch of Highway 54, one hundred and ten miles west of St. Louis and a universe from urban complexities. The building is surrounded by corn and soybean fields, parted to make way for rural education and football. It was built in the uninspiring styling that accompanied 1960’s mass utility construction. Still, the richly green grounds of NCHS and the clear Midwestern skies above it helped remind its students that they were part of something more unique than the simple, low-ceiling construction that surrounded them.

I spent four years at North Callaway being introduced to friendship, love, heartache, disappointment, glory and every other emotion that would take the rest of my life to explore. The people I discovered and learned from gave me a simple pattern for life that I’m happy to be reminded of on blue sky Missouri afternoons with summer winds and flicking leaves.

Friday afternoons in October were the best part of being a teenager. A stream of kids would parade from the high school into a dusty, gravel parking lot that held a collection of cars as mismatched as those who climbed into their warm interiors. Jamie Moser’s tan Cadillac sedan, Nick Kauffman’s restored 1966 red Ranger pick-up, Roger Atkinson’s white Mercury Cougar, and my little red Honda Civic hatchback. There was a race to get out of the parking lot and onto the access road before the buses lined up. It was a time to feel complete freedom and to express it with squealing tires sometimes enhanced by heavy dosing of Clorox bleach.

More often than not, my brother and our cousin, Rhiannon, were passengers with me. Toad the Wet Sprocket or Janet Jackson would play on a cassette in my in-dash Sony stereo as we’d put the windows down and drive the back roads home. The roads were scattered with crumbling asphalt and meandered around old farms that had been firmly rooted in Callaway County for decades. It was all so familiar and comforting; the white farmhouses with gray or green shingled roofs, moving combine teams mowing down thousand-acre fields, cavernous hay and livestock barns, irrigation lakes and everywhere the smell of autumn.

I’d drop off Rhiannon, before Marc and I parked the car under the shade of pear trees at home. Both of us silent, we'd drag in whatever bags had accompanied us to school. Inside, I’d close the door to my bedroom and fall across my bed. I remember the contrasted quiet of the house after a day surrounded by 400 adolescents. Quickly, I'd fall into an afternoon sleep that would allow me to spend midnight hours with the friends I’d just left as we watched movies, went to a game or talked about the confusion of teenage life at one or another of our houses. As my eyes settled, they had no way of knowing how different their world would look when they’d open fifteen years later.

It’s not October, and the summer heat of Missouri is causing thunderstorms separated by amazingly blue skies and alabaster clouds. Still, the release of Friday afternoon and the unsophisticated hopefulness of a weekend throws anticipatory smiles over my mouth. It’s a special set of circumstances that have allowed me to know the world in uncomplicated Friday afternoons filled with color, music, friends and the subtle love of home.