Escape from "George-town"

By the age of 15 there were stirrings of the questions I would later ask, but for now they were buried by guilt and thus denied the benefit of honest inquiry. About that time the daughter of a family I hardly knew, but with whom my parents had lived for months, perhaps a year, came East to attend the same boarding school. Not having grown up with the other kids in the school, she was novel and she was also genuinely different for having grown up in Canada. Circumstances allowed us the opportunity to visit privately without the need for secrecy, and before too many weeks, a mutual crush had developed. But this crossed a line--the no-dating-until-after-high-school rule--and ultimately was coupled with my expressed doubts to justify my expulsion from boarding school.

There you go. That's one of my truly dark secrets; I was kicked out of boarding school.

By then my parents, with my two youngest brothers, then 9 and 3, had suffered the same fate, expulsion. Within months my remaining two brothers, ages 13 and 11, were also home. In retrospect this is fantastic, as I knew families still unable to contact sons and daughters who had forsaken "father and mother" for "the sake of the kingdom of God." Total BS, but that's how the conditioning makes you think.

I landed at Keene High School for the last 2 months of my junior year of high school and the whole of my senior year. I flourished academically because of discipline that had been instilled in boarding school. The first 3 days were overwhelming though, as I made the switch from 40 students in 1st through 12th, with my own class of 5, I think, to a high school with nearly 1800 students from 9th through 12th, and a graduating class of about 380.

My religious convictions gave me stability and a compass in this sea change. Here it seemed simple and clear; I was a Christian and (almost) everyone else was not, so decisions to form attachments or to be involved in activities were generally easy to make. Some of my choices then I wouldn't make now, but in general religion helped me survive psychologically without making me unduly mean or offensive, I think.

And at KHS I encountered the expectation of going to college for the first time in my life. That topic will be the starting point for my next entry.

Until then, peace. John