Ignorant Historian

Since a good friend’s birthday was yesterday, we’re having a good ole fashioned sleepover tonight. We’ve been wanting to do it for a while, so her birthday was just perfect timing.

In honor of this sleepover, I’m going to take us back for this school day memory to one sleepover a time long, long ago. What qualifies it as a school day memory is that it actually happened on a school day for a school-sponsored event.

I only went to 2 such sleepovers, one junior year, one senior year, as our parents weren’t too keen on us going to school dead tired on a normal day. It wouldn’t be that abnormal for high school students, but I was the type that hopped into bed at 10 P.M. on a school night regardless of whether or not I had quite finished my homework. I’m still like that, except that 10 has creeped back a couple of hours to midnight.

Anyway, back to the story, back to the story. Besides the official holidays, there were two holidays that our high school celebrated. One was in the spring celebrating Shakespeare: The Bard’s Birthday Bash. But the biggest school holiday by far was a chemistry holiday: Mole Day. It’s in celebration of the mole, a unit used to represent 6.02 x 10²³ of one thing. It’s celebrated on October 23rd, at 6:02 AM.

Yep, 6:02 AM. Before that hour, all the chemistry students gather at the high school like 30 minutes before that. And 30-45 minutes before that, they gather at the local grocery store (about 4 miles from our rural high school) to “parade” to the high school in our decorated cars. Of course, no one is out on the road at that hour, so it’s all ours.

The first year I participated in Mole Day, my sophomore year, was the first day I ever drove alone in my car. I had had my restricted license for a couple of months, but part of the restrictions is that you can only drive to work or school. Since I didn’t have a car, I never got to do that. But my parents weren’t about to get up in the morning to take me, so I, the 15yo, drove the 4 miles to school down a spooky dirt road, scared to death that a cow was suddenly going to appear before me on the road, as had been known to happen.

Really, I’m a city girl, but our school was in a dinky town. Plus, I’m a Kansas girl, remember? Cows pretty much roam the streets.

Wow, I’m all over the place today. Back to the sleepover…

Because Mole Day started so early and the day would mostly include Mole Day activities and not actual learning, our parents allowed us to have a sleepover. So me and my two best friends, Brooke and Chicago (oh, they’d laugh if they read this because these were their actual code names we used in notes and stuff! I was Lynne Allegra) slept at Chicago’s house. The night of the senior year sleepover, we decided that we would do extra credit for our English class and watch Mel Gibson’s version of Hamlet and compare it to the play. We were just nerds like that.

I don’t think we’ll be watching Hamlet tonight, but maybe we’ll be watching a good Jane Austen.

Other School Day Memories:

Kindergarten and First Grade: Kisses and Skunks
3rd grade: Laundry Chutes and Floppy Disks
4th grade: Watching Whales
7th Grade: Teacher Review
8th Grade: 100 Marble Pick Up
9th Grade: Science Nerd
College Senior Year: Why Procrastination Might Not Be My Thing

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