I Learned to Like Garfield

Sender Marisol Reyes

Email marreyes38@yahoo.com

Posted On 2007-10-11

Year 2001-2005

Memoir It was the first day of school and needless to say I wasn't looking forward to it...but like everyone else I woke up at 8 that morning got ready and headed towards the school I’d dreaded going to for the past 2 months. As I walked in I immediately began my search for familiar faces, but just as I expected, I knew no one...making my way through the crowd seemed endless as I headed towards the cafeteria where I'd been told I'd find a list with the names of all the freshmen and their homeroom. To my surprise a group of my friends had already located themselves in a table near by and were looking pretty confident. I found my name on the list and headed towards my friends. I was pleasantly surprised to find that some of my friends were in my homeroom as well, but that didn’t take away from the disappointment at finding out that my best friend was in a completely different track. Strike one against Garfield. As we headed towards our homeroom I saw all these other kids who were just like me, bored, disappointed and we all knew that there were plenty of places we would much rather be than at Garfield high school on the first day of school. The school was crowded with new students and it was hard to walk. Second strike against this school. It was only the first day and this school had already managed to make my life a miserable. As soon as I got to my homeroom class I was ready to transfer to another school. The teacher looked weird, my classmates looked weird, in fact this whole school was a mixture of one freak after another. There were kids with green hair and dirty clothes, girls with skirts that went down to their feet, and the occasional Goth tossed in there, just for kicks. I didn’t understand why I hated this school so much. It was only the first day and already I was making up excuses as to what I was going to tell my mom my reason was to want to change schools so badly after only one day. But then it hit me...you don’t hate this school stupid, you're just looking for excuses to hate this place because you loved middle school so much you didn’t want to leave. It was then I realized I had to leave middle school behind and grow up. I was in high school now, more would be expected of me, but at the same time I would also get to do much more. Maybe I’d volunteer, join a club, perhaps a sport. Garfield wasn't that bad it was just another school, a new school. This was to be the institution I’d be attending for the next 4 years of my life so it would do me good to start liking it if I didn't want to spend the next 4 years of my life making myself miserable over nothing, and if I remember correctly I hated my middle school just as much if not more the first day I went there too. After that Garfield wasn't that bad, it wasn’t bad at all, in fact I learned to like Garfield...So it wasn’t the fanciest of school, some classrooms smelled funny, some teachers smelled funny, and there was the occasional puddle of milk here and there and a million pieces of gum stuck to the concrete floor...but other than that it wasn’t that bad. There was the occasional dance which Tony or Adrian used to DJ, the random flier parties on the weekends which were extremely overrated so I never went and the occasional football games that I never attended due to the lack of school spirit. But then there was the hand full of teachers that genuinely cared about their students, some of which I had the privilege of learning a thing or two from. Mr. Mitchell, Mrs. Cardona, Yosh, and even Vitale made my time at Garfield bearable. Because of them, the friends I made (Ashley, Nancy, Francine, Mayra, Bee Bee, Brian, Marco...etc) and the crazy times we had I began to dread leaving high school when graduation approached just as I had when it was time to leave middle school behind. I would enter the real world, become an adult, and would no longer be shielded from the outside world by the walls of this school. I wasn’t really going to miss Garfield I’ll admit, because like any other kid I believe school was great but the classes got in the way...I would miss all those people I met and shared those crazy times with, the tennis games, and even the routines...and to this day I continue to miss them because as an adult, now I find myself working and taking on more responsibilities that I didn’t have back in high school...sure when you're in high school you can't wait to get out of there but rest assured when graduation time approaches you'll find yourself wishing you had more time to do so many things differently, and in some extreme cases you might just find yourself missing this place...



Oh and just for the record I never did get to strike number 3...=]