First Lunch

After spending my lunches in junior high as a relative outcast due to my lunchbox carrying, I was grateful to find a friend to share my lunch period with as a sophomore in high school. Greg was the son of a professor at the university, from whom I would eventually learn a great deal about Mark Twain, but that first year at Boulder High was all about our walks to the Municipal Building. Right after our fourth period class bell rang, we went straight to our lockers and exchanged our books for our bags and headed up Arapahoe for the bulk of the fifty minutes we had. The freedom of off-campus lunch would become more apparent to me as I grew older, got a car, and had a girlfriend, but in that formative year of 1977-78, Greg and I were all about the twenty-five cent soda machine.
It was only a three block walk up Arapahoe, which gave us just enough time to slip into our comfortable dance mix of conversation: Monty Python and Saturday Night Live skits we had memorized, teachers and upperclassmen who were getting on our nerves, and a recap of what had been a grueling day in secondary education. Then a few more silly bits. The object was, or at least it became, to get the other guy giggling to the point that when we finally bought our can of pop for a quarter, that a good portion of it would come out through his nose.
It would be comforting to imagine, at this point in my life, that this was a trip we made on special occasions, or only when we were feeling especially constricted by the weight of our youthful oppression. Since I am a creature of habit, I can say that there were days when I made that trip in snow, wind and rain, sometimes all at the same time. There were even a few times I made the walk alone, when Greg was absent or otherwise occupied. I'm sure there must have been a day or two when I found myself stuck at school, staring at the tile as I ate my bologna sandwich, trapped against my will in a facility that charged fifty cents for a can of Pepsi. But those were few and far between, because I needed to stretch my legs. I needed to feel the wind in my hair, while I still had it.
Greg and I had been friends in junior high, but bonded most ferociously over that sophomore year, pausing just before we went back inside the high school to crush the cans we had carried back. The height of this friendship came in the last quarter, when we took Tennis class together. We won the second place ribbon for men's doubles. There were two teams. This was fact was amusing enough to get us both to spout cola from our nostrils.
And then he was gone. It wasn't a falling out or animosity. It was junior year. His world took him to the track, where he ran cross-country. I became more immersed in band. Now when I listen to stories of my son's escapades on the front lawn of his high school with his buddies, I think of Greg and our sophomore meanderings. And when Coke comes out of my nose.