25

Yesterday I had a very busy calendar with three different events on tap - I skipped all of them but our Samhain ritual last night. One of the ones I skipped was a workshop at work; yeah, I could use the CEUs, but there was no way I could get myself moving.

The other event was my 25th high school reunion.

Gasp! you say. How could she bail on that?

For one thing, I haven't attended a class reunion in 20 years. The nearing of my 10 year reunion sent me into a suicidal spin that landed me in therapy. I felt like I was a failure, working as a secretary for just above minimum wage after graduating second in my class, while others in my class were already pulling 6-figure incomes. I couldn't face it.

My 20th reunion invitation found me in a much healthier place, but carried a pricetag of about $75 per person. Yeah, right! Skipped that one, too.

Our 25th reunion was a little more reasonably priced, and yet I have felt very noncommittal about it. For one thing, I have had no contact with any of my classmates for the last 20+ years until a few weeks ago, when one classmate emailed and called me, and then another did the same. Nice, right? but it's been more than 20 years.... The two close friends that I had kept in touch with after graduation fell by the wayside a long time ago. What would be the point of going? I don't play games, I don't care how many diamonds you're wearing or where your husband works or who you had over for dinner last night. I would talk to the few people I would like to catch up with, and then I'd be done. I would have to play nice and look interested for the next couple of hours when all I wanted to do was leave. I might as well be at work!

Did I mention I attended an all-girl Catholic high school?

Can you imagine the reaction when they asked me what I've been doing for the last 25 years?

"Well, I graduated from Cal State Fullerton with a degree in History. Got married. Had 3 kids. I'm divorced. Oh yeah, and I'm a lesbian."

20 Years Ago Today

I was starting my second month of teaching high school history at my alma mater. I had arrived early enough - around 7:15 am - to prepare for classes to begin at 8:00 am. I had stopped into the office and then the upstairs teachers' lounge for a cup of coffee, and was walking down the hallway to my classroom at around 7:40 am.

The school is built into the side of a hill, with the first floor only open on one side; the second floor had two sides to it, and my room was on the back side. Along the hallway across from the classrooms were lockers and a wall of plexiglass, blocking the view of hillside above us.

I heard the plexiglass rattle and thought it must be a sonic boom; we were right under the flight path of the space shuttle on its way to land at Edwards Air Force Base. My second thought was that it could not be the shuttle - this was a year and a half after the Challenger explosion and the fleet was still grounded. My entire thought process from the rattle to my conclusion felt like minutes but was probably a nanosecond. I knew it was an earthquake. I yelled to the girls in the hallway to get away from the windows and to duck down and cover their heads. We hadn't had an earthquake of any size in their lifetimes; the last big one we'd had in LA was the Sylmar quake in 1971, more than 18 years earlier.

When the shaking stopped we had all the students evacuate the building down to the lawn, where we gathered everyone by home room and started taking roll. Part of the problem was that school hadn't started yet, and students were still arriving on campus. At the same time, frantic parents were calling the school office and showing up out front to take their girls back home again. We must have stood outside on that lawn in 100+ degree heat for a good 6 hours trying to sort everything out. Fortunately, there was no damage to the school other than hysterical students and frayed nerves.

It turned out to have been a fairly large quake (5.9 or so - data varies) on a previously unknown fault, and became known as the Whittier Narrows quake. The epicenter was pretty close to downtown Whittier, which was at the other end of the range of hills that the school was built into the side of - about 10 miles away. No wonder we had such a ride. Downtown Whittier had major damage; many of the old buildings were of unreinforced masonry. It took them months to clean it up.

Not long after that, we set up an emergency plan. All of the teachers were involved. We bought containers and supplies (food, water, first aid, etc) to last the entire school population for three days. We all received First Aid training. I was assigned to the Search and Rescue team, and we had drills with students and teachers acting out the roles of the injured and deceased. It was quite an undertaking, and I learned quite a bit. The school went from having a vague idea of what to do during an emergency to having a well-orchestrated plan. I have no idea if they are still as well-prepared, but I certainly hope so.

Smoke and Ashes

This afternoon, I was sitting at my desk, training a new employee. It dawned on me I was smelling smoke, and for a fraction of a second, I just assumed someone had burned their popcorn again. Then I recognized the smell of burning brush. I immediately logged onto a local news website and discovered that a brush fire was burning about 3 miles from our office, and we were directly downwind - the smoke had come in through the A/C. The headache that had been threatening all day suddenly emerged to the front of my head. About 40 minutes later, I took a break and got up to walk around a bit. That's when I realized the headache was turning into a migraine - I was getting nauseous. I went to the boss and said, "I'm getting a migraine." He said, "Go home!" So I left work an hour early, knowing I needed to get home before the full migraine hit, and knowing that the freeways would be snarled because of the brushfire. Sure enough, it took me nearly an hour to drive the 10 miles it took me to clear the smokestream, all the while, watching large pieces of ash hit the windshield and break into tiny pieces. It took me two hours to get home (all of 35 miles).

It's amazing the memory our nasal passages have. It was 1980 when I had my Close Encounter with a brush fire. I was volunteering at a week-long summer camp for children and adults with developmental disabilities. We were staying at a private residential school in the foothills in Riverside County. My group was at "Music", outside, when another one of the counselors and I noticed that there was smoke coming up over the ridge above us. The other counselor left to tell the camp director, while the rest of us gathered our campers and told them we were going on a hike - to a football field about 1/4 mile away from the blaze. The camp director evacuated the buildings and had everyone down at the football field fairly quickly, except for a few campers that had to be physically removed from the dorms (some people are awfully cranky when you wake them up from a nap!) We stayed down on that field, leading 175 people in camp songs, for hours. Finally, we got the all-clear from the fire department and heading back to the buildings. As we entered the dorms, I realized that the flames had actually burned all the way up to the building - a short brick wall and a sidewalk were all that had separated the dorms from the brushfire.

Later that evening, after our campers were mostly in bed asleep, a group of us counselors were hanging out on a hiking trail, blowing off some steam and the stress of the day, when another counselor came pounding down the trail toward the buildings, yelling, "There's a hot spot!" That's when I began to panic. I'd held up during the initial fire, even though it was my first experience with anything like that, but the thought of waking up 80 developmentally and physically disabled people and evacuating them was more than I could face. Between the stress and the smoke still in the air, I ended up having a mild asthma attack. Fortunately the Fire Department showed up quickly and put out the glowing tree trunk, and we didn't have to evacuate anyone.

Twenty-seven years later, I still recognize the smell of burning chaparral almost immediately, and my first thought is always of that teenager yelling, "There's a hot spot!" Fortunately, it's not accompanied by a sense of panic.