When I was in elementary school, I was considered a good girl by my teachers. Friends' parents remarked on my politeness, my quietness, my composure. Strangers smiled down at my angelic countenance when I held a door for them. Being sent to the Principal's office was just about the worst thing I could imagine happening to me.
Elementary school was a Pacific Ocean of multiplication tables, recesses and accolades from adults. I was pretty content. The worst thing I can recall doing involved an afternoon in my family's camper with a male friend. We picked some eggplants from our garden, cut them up with a vegetable peeler and used some toxic white paint as a sauce to "cook" them in. Jordan and I ruined several pots, some cushions and his new winter coat.
When our mothers found us, Jordan was literally up to his elbows in paint while my garments had nary a tell-tale smudge -- only my hands revealed my role in this culinary escapade. Jordan's mother seemed particularly upset about his new coat, apoplectic even, and of course my mother was also disturbed that we were covered in this white paint. I found out years later that they were truly only afraid that we were flammable -- which we were indeed. Both our mothers assumed that the entire incident had been Jordan's idea. After all, I was a "good girl" and he was a mischievous boy.
I enjoyed my "well-behaved" reputation in those days. With Jordan I got a taste of the fun of misbehaving, but overall I was loathe to disappoint anyone so I did not rebel. The teachers' helpers on the playground referred to me as the "Gilliar child." I look back now and think I felt that a long line of Gilliar ghosts were depending on me to preserve the family name. And of course, there was that constant fear of the Principal's office anyway -- students who were sent there seemed the epitome of infantile delinquency and all that I would not allow myself to be.
In junior high school, I looked back on my elementary school days and thought I should have raised more hell and tipped more cows before I hit the "big time." The Principal's office seemed far away and not so scary. I wished I had misbehaved when it would not have mattered.
And so I continued my tradition of being one of the children that teachers like, the well-behaved model of perfection who never speaks out of turn or disrupts a class. And I graduated to look back on junior high and think "I shouldn't have been so darn good."
Now, in college, in many ways I think the same thing of high school. Maybe I should have kicked up my heels more often, and higher. After all, this is the "big time" much more than those other periods of my academic life were. Or is it?
Homecoming has just passed. I must admit that I know more than one of the students who was arrested during the course of the weekend. Right now, court dates pending, ink still fresh on their fingertips, I am sure it seems as though the music in their Dartmouth dreams has slowed and twisted, gone suddenly sharp.
As one of them intoned, "My mother is going to think it's a joke when I tell her. When you met me, didn't you think I was a good boy?" It is difficult for anyone to let go of that image of him or herself. It is even harder to realize you do not have to let go of it -- nice boys and nice girls can do crazy things without losing their "nice" status. Any crime is serious, but in the case of my friend, it is a class B misdemeanor, not pillage and plunder, murder and mayhem. So perhaps its importance needs to be put in perspective.
An arrest now, whether it be for stealing a police officer's hat or smoking up on the Green, five years from now will fade into a wryly humorous memory. And many years from now, it will provide bragging material at an office holiday party or for a hoard of newly-teenaged children who will be in awe of their father's "badness." I am not condoning either theft or drug use, I am just pointing out that one incident in an otherwise laudable scholarly career is nothing to break down over.
It seems that whatever part of life we are in, every problem, every set-back, looks fiercer while you are living it. Things look smaller when you are further away from them. Of course, maybe it is easier for me to expound on the importance of not taking an arrest too seriously. After all, I can still look back and say, "I've always been a good girl."
