I guess I’m pretty unique these days. Except for my years attending U.C Riverside and a couple years living in Italy and England, I have lived all my life here in Claremont after my parents moved here in 1962, when I was 2. This is quite different from what I hear from most people with their stories of relocating, sometimes from state to state and sometimes a number of times.
I was thinking about this in the last month or so, as another school year ended and there was another weekend of graduations at the colleges here. I was thinking about I have grown up and now am growing older in Claremont, about seeing so many others do the same and about how Claremont is a special, unique place to grow up and to grow older and old.
This is what I intended to write about in my latest Claremont Courier column, published two Fridays ago and featured below. I don’t know if I nailed this exactly, but it does reflect on my seeing life and its passages in this town.
GROWING UP, GROWING OLDER, IN AND ON STAGES, IN CLAREMONT
“I hate high school.”
We were driving into the parking lot of Claremont High School. What I really meant was that I hate the speed bumps in the high school’s parking lot, remembering the quote I once read in a senior wills – senior wills! How high school! – edition of the Wolfpacket: “College is high school without the speed bumps.”
Despite some mixed feelings about my days at C.H.S and despite feeling a bit weird about still going there and seeing all those awkwardly young, not-o-young kids where I was in a similar awkward state some 40 years ago, I was there to offer support and admire some good work being done. I was being dropped off one Friday evening last month to see the latest production at the school’s theater.
I don’t attend the football games and other sports events at the school, but I do cheer on the “theater kids.” While this play, “Rumors of Polar Bears” by Brian Dorf about teenagers wandering in an environment decimated by climate change, wasn’t my cup of tea, I am more and more thankful for this program offering a safe and stimulating space for these kids who may not fit into the sports and pep scene.
And it’s great to see that, after 60 years and, remarkably, just two directors, the work as director of this program is now being carried on, and capably so, by Mohammed Mangrio. He was a student of Krista Elhai at Hemet High School before she came to Claremont to start a 27-year run as the theater director, where she was beloved, demanding and tireless, taking the baton from the legendary Don Fruechte, who founded the high school’s theater program and for whom the renovated theater is named.
On the way home that evening, going down College Avenue and noting how Pomona College was set up, decked out for commencement that weekend, I didn’t say I didn’t like the colleges’ graduation ceremonies, but I did find myself thinking of how they reminded me of something I didn’t like when I was doing theater work.
I didn’t take part in theater when I was in high school. No, my work in the theater came much later, and I loved it. What I loved most about working in theater was rehearsing. I loved creating a scene and working on it, working with others to make this happen, collaborating to bring a vision to life and making it better and better. I loved this creating together, this collaboration.
When it came time for performances, I wouldn’t say they were a let-down, but I was always a bit sad, disappointed, yes, let down, that the creating together was over.
Driving home past the commencement stage set up at Pomona College that night, it occurred to me, perhaps because I had just seen the “theater kids” at the high school in a play, that the colleges’ commencements are a bit like what I remember performances were like. Yes, they are something to cheer, something to be proud of, but, at least for us townees, all the fun, really good stuff is done. All the talks, concerts, plays and other presentations that had made our lives in Claremont all the richer over the past eight months are over.
I dare say the students have the same bittersweet feeling. They may not say so now, just glad to be done with all the hard work and that they’ve made it out alive and with a degree, but they will soon see how good, how rich, how, yes, fun all that hard work, all that learning and creating and collaborating with new friends and professors was. And they’ll miss it.
Summer isn’t as sleepy – or dead, as I used to think – as it used to be in Claremont. (Or maybe those growing up now think that Claremont is dead in the summer?) But, still, decades later, summer is a quiet time, a down time, in Claremont. It is an invitation to reflect on the activities and accomplishments in the past months, whether at the colleges, in our schools or in our lives, and to take a breather and prepare for what’s next.
No comments:
Post a Comment