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fleaDuring my senior year in high school (at an elite New England prep school) I co-edited the literary magazine with a boy I'll call Tom, since that was his name. He and I were elevated to the positin of editors at the end of our junior year by the English faculty, despite the fact that we'd never been involved with the magazine before, and there were several girls who had been for a couple of years already. I think they figured we could write, we needed extracurriculars to get into good colleges, and maybe we weren't as pretentious at the gaggle of lit-mag girls who were the natural heirs.
Tom and I corresponded (by letter - this was the olden days, folks) a little about writing that summer; he was from far upstate New York, near the Canada and Vermont borders, and was working on a Hemingwayesque novel about a father and son and fishing. I was reading short stories and trying to like them, and thinking about writing them although I was convinced (and still am) that I am not a writer of fiction by nature. We edited the magazine though the first half of the year happily enough, despite the fact that almost everything in it was crap. (I mean, even genius writers tend to write self-absorbed crap at 16, you know?) I had a minor crush on Tom, mostly because I was deeply interested in boys, knew almost none of them socially, and he was a boy I knew socially. (I had much more dramatic crushes on other boys). He was interested in stuff, and wasn't interested in doing what everybody else did, and while like any 17 year old wanna-be Hemingway he was kind of pretentious, he was at least pretentious in a vastly different way from most people in prep school.
Well, he started dating one of the lit-mag groupies midway through the year, a New York city girl who vacationed with her family on Anguilla (which despite nearly 4 years of prep school I still hadn't heard of). I basically stopped working on the magazine during the spring due to being forced out by them, and didn't much care, except I was sort of saddened by the whole thing. I'm not sure if they went to college together, but they got married remarkably early - right out of college I think (which *nobody* who goes to prep school does).
I Googled them both the other night, since my prep school alumni bulletin came in the mail and something made me think of them. He works at Christie's handling 19th century print materials, mostly, and has appeared on the Antiques Road Show; he used to be with a dealer in NYC before that. His photo makes him look prematurely pompous. She writes for 'national shelter magazines' about design and home stuff, and they live in what is described as, alternately, "the Hudson Valley" or "Westchester" (which, it's been a while since I lived that close to NYC, but I remember as not the same place). So, typical corporate arty/elite establishment jobs that graduates of my prep school who aren't investment bankers or lawyers tend to hold.
I wonder if he ever thinks about his old goals of writing a novel, and leading an authentic rural life, and being divorced from the pretentiousness of prep school.
Tom and I corresponded (by letter - this was the olden days, folks) a little about writing that summer; he was from far upstate New York, near the Canada and Vermont borders, and was working on a Hemingwayesque novel about a father and son and fishing. I was reading short stories and trying to like them, and thinking about writing them although I was convinced (and still am) that I am not a writer of fiction by nature. We edited the magazine though the first half of the year happily enough, despite the fact that almost everything in it was crap. (I mean, even genius writers tend to write self-absorbed crap at 16, you know?) I had a minor crush on Tom, mostly because I was deeply interested in boys, knew almost none of them socially, and he was a boy I knew socially. (I had much more dramatic crushes on other boys). He was interested in stuff, and wasn't interested in doing what everybody else did, and while like any 17 year old wanna-be Hemingway he was kind of pretentious, he was at least pretentious in a vastly different way from most people in prep school.
Well, he started dating one of the lit-mag groupies midway through the year, a New York city girl who vacationed with her family on Anguilla (which despite nearly 4 years of prep school I still hadn't heard of). I basically stopped working on the magazine during the spring due to being forced out by them, and didn't much care, except I was sort of saddened by the whole thing. I'm not sure if they went to college together, but they got married remarkably early - right out of college I think (which *nobody* who goes to prep school does).
I Googled them both the other night, since my prep school alumni bulletin came in the mail and something made me think of them. He works at Christie's handling 19th century print materials, mostly, and has appeared on the Antiques Road Show; he used to be with a dealer in NYC before that. His photo makes him look prematurely pompous. She writes for 'national shelter magazines' about design and home stuff, and they live in what is described as, alternately, "the Hudson Valley" or "Westchester" (which, it's been a while since I lived that close to NYC, but I remember as not the same place). So, typical corporate arty/elite establishment jobs that graduates of my prep school who aren't investment bankers or lawyers tend to hold.
I wonder if he ever thinks about his old goals of writing a novel, and leading an authentic rural life, and being divorced from the pretentiousness of prep school.
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Date: 2006-02-02 08:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-02 09:22 pm (UTC)I love googling ex'es and old school people. Downright freaky mindblowing sometimes.
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Date: 2006-02-02 09:34 pm (UTC)