You know, I just recently found and joined one of those Yahoo Groups for my high school.

I immediately got two emails announcing that two of our alumni had passed away, and it got me to thinking.

You know how you get those jokey email lists "You Know You Grew Up in the 70's If..."

Well, here's my attempt "You Know You Grew Up in 70's South DeKalb If..."

• You and most your friends went to school together from 1st grade through HS graduation.


• If someone moved, it was a time for great rending of hair and gnashing of teeth. Nobody moved. You knew you'd never see them or hear from them again.


• You built bicycle circuses in the block crawl spaces of homes under construction, complete with ramps and jumps.


• Played hopscotch in your driveway, using scraps of drywall taken from those same homes


• Had sno-cones at the pool at ECA when the confluence of the heavens was right, i.e. your parents could spare you a few cents, and the sno-cone maker was actually working for a change.


• Snapped your elastic anklet "member bracelet" into the pool to dive for, or worse,  at your friend's heads, hoping to get their attention.


• "Adult Swim" meant teenagers making out in the pool while we all ignored them and watched the lifeguard's every movement, crazed with anticipation for him to blow the whistle.


• Avoiding  The Circle. No one knows quite why, but it was verbotten territory. But still, everybody played in the culvert at least once, and got in big trouble when caught.


• Same with shortcuts through the woods to Kroger. We were too innocent to know why.


• Playing  baseball games in the front yard. The big pine tree was home base, and your mailbox was first, mine was second, and Mrs Yerty's bumper was usually third base, at least, as long as she was at home.


• It didn't matter that we lived on a steep hill. We got our excercise outrunning the ball before it ran into the gutter


• Hot Dog lived in the neighbor's yard. That wasn't his real name, but he was universally known as Hot Dog, and would bark at the drop of a hat, particularly at little girls chasing gutterballs.


• Watching TV with friends. Debating the merits of Mr Roger's Neighborhood versus Sesame Street.


• The first time I realized with a shock that someone was a different color than me, and asking my dad, who told me it didn't matter, I was to respect everyone the same.


• Staying out til well past twilight, playing hide'n seek with walky talkies


• Everyone watched Friday Night Frights with Dead Ernest. My dad  would throw sock balls at me during the scary parts


• All the kids on the block helped paint our covered wagon, and my dad, who'd had a few, hooked it up to the riding mower and rewarded us all with a ride through the neighborhood. About thirty kids hanging out of this lifesized covered wagon. Anybody here remember that? Then the amazing cowboy and indian games we would have in it.  WIth real cap guns and suction cup bow and arrows, in that far away time when a kid with a cap gun wasn't considered a mortal threat.


• Judy and Barb's dad keeping a horse in the basement. It was OK. We had a pony in our back yard for a while.The neighbors were cool with it.


• Catching a hundred frogs in a bucket up at Emerald Lake. Ms Martin the third grade teacher dumped them in the aquarium, and when we got to school the next day, the turtle had eaten every last one of them.


• Dick & Jane books in third grade.


• Listening to the heavy equipment building I-285.


• THE Ice Storm of 1971 (?).  How beautiful and glittering the world was, and what fun we had. We were out of school for days. Corliss and Taye came down to my house, and we played at being horses, biting the icicles off with our teeth. My family slept around a Coleman camper heater for several nights.


• That wierd experimental class they put some of us in in 5th grade, and the time poor Tim Smith got suspended over his creative writing assignment. Brilliant kid. 5th grade work was a complete waste of time for him. Hey, Tim, if you're out there, I hope you went on to great things.


• Sections A, B, C, & D.  No dumbing down of the classroom in those days.


• Our crazy 7th grade teacher who never accepted that the South had lost The War, and left a lot of us scratching our heads, but me with an abiding interest in the Civil War.


• There were so many kids in the neighborhood that you practically needed a traffic cop at the doors on Halloween. OMG the candy we'd come home with! It's a wonder any of us have teeth left.


• Going up to Covington Highway on the 4th, and sitting on the roof of the car watching the fireworks over at Stone Mountain.


• Every kid knew where the bullies lived (and they weren't kids, btw), and walked past that house as fast as we could. When rumors popped up about the knife attack, lots of us walked home taking the long way.


• Oh yeah, we walked to school. It started out by my house as just two or three kids, but you picked up more and more until it looked like a river of kids by the time you got up to Canby Lane.  The crossing guards earned their money in those days.


• Mathis Dairy. I Milked Rosebud.


• Hoping you'd make it home by 3:30 so you could catch Gilligan's Island on The Superstation. Hoping your brother and sister hadn't eaten all the Little Debbies, and had left you one. Hiding some to make sure.


• School safety patrols were the law, and you respected them.


• Riding bikes to and from school. Unstable bikes with butterfly handlebars and banana seats. Getting knocked out cold when one got away from me.


• In elementary school, everything seemed exaggerated. The school was HUGE. The ceilings HIGH. The hallways WIDE. The principal seemed really OLD because he was bald. Then when you went back a few years later, you realized everything was tiny (especially the toilets), and realized the principal was only in his 30's.


• The night before the first day of elementary school, you'd be up all night,  too excited to sleep. You had a few new clothes, if you were lucky, and had spent hours debating between the brown dress or the blue.  That last night, putting the new paper and pencil bag into the new notebook, on the counter by your new lunchbox, well,it was a ritual. If you were a girl, your mom had wrapped your head in painful foam rollers, and you felt like a princess if you had a bottle of Tinkerbell cologne. If you were a boy, you had gotten a fresh buzz cut the day before up at the little barbershop by the Big Apple.


• The night before the first day of High School, you were up all night, too, but with your stomach in knots.


• You learned quickly to avoid the kids selling elevator passes and Senior Court passes.


• There were sooooo many halls. Would you ever learn your way around the school? It was so big!


• Band was the best class of the day. Too bad we could never keep a  band director for very long. D'ya think it was because we were so opinionated, and convinced we ruled the roost?


• The dressing rooms smelled bad, the gym smelled worse, and there were dust bunnies under the bleachers the size of cows. And Oh! Those girls' gym suits! The ones with the long zippers up the front.


• Homecoming consisted of papering cars with kleenex flowers made at flower-making parties. And we thought they looked gorgeous.


• Sarge was the sweetest old fellow in the world. We all loved him.


• whisper whisper whisper  does that guy really smoke pot? other whispers, darker ones, that we had to go home and ask our parents what they meant. At least, I did!


• The day the Space Shuttle flew over the school, piggybacked on a jet. That was earthshaking stuff.


• The day Elvis died. Becky Jordan crying her eyes out on the balcony.


• White Flight.  Block Busting. One of the ugliest and most shameful things I ever saw, needlessly ruinous to families who left, and to those who stayed. 


• Favorite teachers: Mr Stringer, Mrs. Richardson, Ms. Warthan    


• Underappreciated teachers: Mrs. Richardson, and Ms Sandidge


• Teachers who put us into a coma:  No Names  (I'll be kind here, since some probably had kids at Towers)


• Gremlins, Pintos, Novas, and soon-to-be-classic Mustangs in the student parking lot.


• Pizza Inn, Taco Bell, 7-11.  Kmart, Richway, and Treasure Island.  Belvedere. Columbia Mall and that wonderful little merry-go-round. What a wonder South DeKalb Mall was when it opened, but a few years later, Northlake Mall was the epitome of luxe.   Giving concerts at both.


• The anticipation of football games. For me it was the marching band, but nearly everyone did something- football team, drill team, cheerleading, pep squad (which always struggled).  The bus rides to and from games- the smell, the feel, the emotion of those bus rides.


• Our much loved drum cadence, "Little Brown Jug". BTW, did you all appreciate how good our band was? I'l tell you know. We were.  No other band in the county dared to field Shostakovitch.


• Those little foil football ribbons they'd sell on Fridays.


• Being the first house on the block to have Cable TV, and watching Halloween on TV through the cracks in my fingers, while the guys yucked it up, laughing at us girls.


• Being the first house on the block with an LED calculator. Neighbors actually came to visit our calculator.


• The awkwardness, the insecurity, the painful self conciousness of high school, the realizing that there's clicques, and I'm not in them, and my mother's distress at not being able to help ease the pain. Now that I'm in those same shoes, I tell my kids, "Happiness is what you make of it", but to them, it's all lip service. It's something they have to learn on their own. It's one thing I can't give them or truly share with them, no matter how much I love them.


• And ultimately, growing up to be the first class geek everyone always suspected I was, but dammit, a happy geek.

I find myself wishing more and more that my kids could've experienced their childhood in such a simpler, happier time and place.  Wouldn't do the High School part again for a million bucks, but some of the memories are very good.  I often wonder what will be their memories of their childhood, but when I ask them, they laugh, and say they're in it right now, so they really couldn't tell me. Kids are very wise.