Alphabet Days

Let me just start off this little number by saying that being the teacher’s kid absolutely sucks. Everyone’s completely convinced that you’re gonna tattle on them for something stupid, you can’t get in any trouble or else your parent will know immediately, and nobody wants to be your friend because nobody likes a teacher’s pet. Because, of course, being the son of your elementary school’s music teacher automatically makes you a teacher’s pet, even if you can’t suck up to anybody to save your life.

I grew up going to Claymore Elementary with all of my peers knowing that my mother was the crazy music teacher that made her students listen to avant-garde foreign screeching while letting us run wild on cheap plastic instruments. She’d always had that weirdo reputation and I tried my best to avoid it, never talking to her except when she drove me home from school.

And still, despite my efforts, I ended up alone all throughout grade school.

I guess it never helped that my mom would call me out specifically in music class, saying stuff like, “Sing for us, Ren! I know you can!” which prompted so many giggles and snorts from my classmates that I could feel myself hating people already at such a young age.

For that reason, among other many motivations, I kinda shut myself in for that first era of school. But sometimes there were little glimmers of hope, music days where I didn’t slightly resent my mother for isolating me. One glimmer happened to be named Luke Ragan. He was in my class in second grade, and then the next year he was as well, along with a few more times later on in grade school. I didn’t speak to him much. (Actually, I hardly spoke to anybody – I talked to him more than anybody else, which is saying something.)

See, when he came to Claymore in 2002 when we were in second grade, it was more of a crash landing than anything else. He started off really nervous and clumsy, shy and unsociable, so far from who he’d become. My mom told me one time over dinner that he had come from a tragic event that uprooted him from his home in New Jersey and that she hoped nobody would bother him.

In seventh grade when we started to actually become friends, I learned that Luke crashed into Claymore because his parents died in a fire and his foster parents lived down here, and his anxiety stemmed from all of that stuff, I assumed. I didn’t think much of him back then. He was just another kid.

But this one time in music class in third grade, I started to figure that he wasn’t just some new kid. We were supposed to play in groups on a xylophone and coordinate a little ditty to play for the class, and as usual for every single group effort I’d been in during my school career up to that point, I was alone. I didn’t even bother asking anybody if I could join their group, because they’d laugh, and I didn’t want to bring in any more attention from my mother.

Luke didn’t know me for a hole in the ground. I don’t think he picked up on the fact that Mrs. Hawker, the music teacher, shared a last name with Ren Hawker, resident nobody, and for that, I shouldn’t have been surprised when he walked across the room while everybody else was grouping up and asked me, “Hey, can I be in your group?”

I was kinda bewildered, but I said, “Uh, yeah,” anyways, not one to turn down a seemingly genuine outreach.

Luke has always been a really great person. I don’t really like saying that sort of crap without a reason, but he really has put up with a lot of bullshit, particularly from our band Plaster Caster and our manager. His best friend Brendan, our drummer, boils over a lot and Luke’s the only one who really knows how to calm him down. I kind of attacked him in ninth grade for comforting my girlfriend (Soria, who’s also our guitarist) when she came clean about something that happened a year before. Soria has given him a lot of crap for his love of ska. And Joey, our manager, is completely unpredictable and may or may not have the hots for Luke – and Luke has never been a jerk to him over it.

So I don’t know the exact reason why he reached out to me that day and pretty much every other time I was alone in a group project throughout grade school. However, I do know the reason why I remembered that particular instance, and the funny thing is, I ran into sort of the same situation today.

It’s 2011 right now and we’re far from the little boogers running around in second grade, but at heart and in social situations, I’m still the same awkward twerp I’ve always been, scared to ask anybody for a helping hand.

Luke and I ended up taking the same American History class our junior year while Soria is stuck taking some weird class called Human Geography and Brendan’s doing European History, and so naturally, we’re in the same class period. I don’t generally like talking to people one-on-one, even if I’ve known them for all my life. So, when our teacher told us to get into groups to make posters with specific aspects of the colonial era, I just kind of assumed Luke would be his friendly self and pair up with some other folks.

Desks shuffled away from me. Nobody had asked me to join them, just as I’d predicted – even when you’re the singer for a hometown-famous band, if you’re shyer than a potato, nobody will want to talk to you because they know you won’t talk back. Scraping against tile, chairs fled, and soon, I had my very own poster paper in front of me that I was ready to cram with facts about my favorite subject – US history.

Someone tapped on my desk, though, and I looked up. Of course it was Luke, smiling like he didn’t even realize how antisocial I was making myself.

“Howdy, partner,” he smirked. “Wanna work together?”

“Sure, pull up a chair,” I said back, uncapping the magic marker in my hand.

He scooted a loose chair up to my desk and then stared at the paper. “So…what do we write?”

“Uh,” I stammered, trying to get a grasp on my thoughts, “stuff, I think.”

“Ah, the history buff,” he snorted, elbowing me in such a peaceful manner that I couldn’t help a smile right back.

I don’t even know if he remembers that little gesture from way back when, and maybe someday I’ll ask him if he does. One thing is for sure, though – whether people look at Luke Ragan as the worst dancer in our band or the biggest pushover in the history of the planet, I look at him as the first person who went out of their way to make me feel welcome when I wasn’t even the new kid.