It is the fall of 2000 I am a
brand new teacher fresh out of college with only 9 weeks of student teaching
under my belt. I have been put into a refurbished building and I am teaching
science to 7-12 grade students most of which have been in trouble with the law
(they neglected to mention this in the interview). By the end of the first day
I was in a zoned out daze. What am I
doing? I will not quit, but if I could
survive was another story. This will be
a different blog or two.
Jake was still a college student
at ATI so we met up on weekends and spent a lot of time together. It has been nine months of romantic
encounters, long nights talking and a few beef meetings. It was Thursday night, Jake and I were
attending a beef meeting at my old high school Ag. Room, where Dr. DeBruin was
the guest speaker. Dr. DeBruin was a
former Agriculture Education teacher turned Veterinarian and an awesome educator
for the beef community. It was a great
date night, so I thought. Jake took me
back to my parents where we usually stayed up too late watching television and
then he would leave to go to his parents where he stayed when he was home from
college. This night though, we didn’t get past the kitchen table. Jake was
acting odd after the meeting. Then he
started in hmming around and not completing sentences and finally the words
came out “maybe we should just be friends”.
We were already past going back to being friends. We both knew that wasn’t going to
happen. It was now almost midnight, I
was crying and we were clearly not going to reconcile this mess tonight. Through my tears, I said just said - take me
to Jackie’s. So I called Mary and Jackie
and of course we would have a girls night sleep over at Jackie’s house. Jackie and I both had to be at work and Mary
had college classes to attend in the morning, but because we were in our early
20’s we stayed up to 3AM bashing boys and eating junk food. We resolved nothing, but I felt a little
better. So at 6AM I got up, showered and went to work. By lunch time Jackie and Mary had left a
message they were both playing hooky.
Really you two, I am the one in emotional turmoil and you two are
shirking responsibility. When I returned
from lunch there were flowers on my desk.
I secretly hate flowers, but the thought that Jake was sorry made me
feel better. I immediately went to my desk to get the card, it read hope your
day is getting better – Jackie and Mary.
You have to be kidding me, when I get out of here I am going to hunt my
best friends down. School finally let
out and I headed home, I was exhausted.
I spend most of Friday night and Saturday laying around, moping and
crying. Jake however had headed to a steer
show with my brother. Jake called both
Friday night and Saturday morning. I am
wondering – why are you calling me? But
I enjoyed every minute of each phone call.
Saturday I decided to make an appointment to cut all my hair off. The kind of life changing hair cut a girl
gets, when dumped by a great guy like Jake.
My hair was well past my shoulders and I cut it so short they shaved the
back of my neck. Saturday night, some of
my teachers friends were going to BW3’s in Lancaster, so I said what the
heck. I walk in and there sat all of
Jake’s friends. SUPER!! They yell and ask
me where Jake was. I said at a steer
show with my brother and we broke up. It
was nice to be out but still not much fun.
Jake called Sunday on his way home to ask if we could go to the Pizza
Cottage. Of course I wouldn’t turn down
the Pizza Cottage. By the end of the
night we were back together.
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