School was out. Summer break had begun. This was the summer before my senior year. It was my last summer of high school. Life would change next year.

However, in June of 1993, things were already changing. And for the better.

One particular moment inspired this post. I was riding back from North Dallas’ Prestonwood Mall with a friend named “Justin”. He was driving his parent’s red mustang. The top was down. The hot June air cooled our faces as we drove south on Campbell Road before turning west on Hillcrest.

I was happy, on many levels.

One, Justin wanted to be a genuine friend. Now, I’d been friends with him throughout our junior year from the fall of ’92 to the spring of ’93. I’d been friends with others in his clique then too. We’d all drank a lot of beer together. We’d almost started a riot on the day of the Cowboy Super Bowl Victory Parade on February 9th. We’d done other stupid things.

But, this was during my junior year. In the summer of 1992, before my junior year, when I thought I had made friends through sophomore athletics, well, I hadn’t really. I didn’t see anyone from the Pearce football team once in the summer of ’92. They ghosted me because I didn’t have a car. Everyone else at uppity and snotty JJ Pearce did. I was an outcast.

I never felt embarassed about not having a car. There was a nascent “fuck these people” attitude growing quite strong within me then. I cherish that attitude now. But, it hurt that whatever friendships I’d thought I’d made through sophomore athletics were false impressions, because they would have had to pick me up to hang out. They didn’t want to do that.

Almost thirty-four years later, as I write these words, the estrangement I felt in the summer of 1992 of course doesn’t bother me. But it hurt like hell once upon a time. That was one reason among many why I disliked most of my time through Richardson ISD. It always felt like a popularity contest I wanted to win but never could.

That’s terrible for kids. But I’ll not digress here.

Now, after the summer of 1992, as I alluded to above, things had changed. During my junior year, after that summer of estrangement, I’d proven myself to be a good football player and powerful lifter in the weight room. That commanded respect. As a result, I became a wee bit more known or popular. My drunken antics were widely known too, and laughed at, because they were funny as hell.

But the summer of ’93 was now upon me. I was kinda’ dreading it. I was dreading being forgotten again. I was dreading having to feel like a “loser” because whatever small popularity I thought I’d won the previous year would disappear. The things that run through kids’ minds!

Driving back from Prestonwood Mall with Justin, after having just bought the boardgame Axis and Allies, because he wanted to play it with me throughout the summer, was the moment in which all the loneliness I’d been dreading instantly dissipated. Justin wanted to be a genuine friend. This meant the world to me. I never told him that. I should.

However, this wasn’t the only good thing. Remember, I said I was happy at many levels.

See, in that moment riding in the red mustang, I had reached a state of mind, about two weeks beforehand, in which I’d learned how to control my diet so as to lose weight. My food intake was changing. I had learned how to discipline myself. I could see and feel the difference after two weeks.

To those who don’t know, I grew up with a terrible shame for being fat. I never could control myself. Didn’t know how. It has taken decades to gain an iron control of my diet, and weakness still attacks. It always will.

However, a thinner, better future was on the horizon. Maybe people would be blown away by the new me that would show up on campus for the start of my senior year. Maybe girls would like me too. Thus, my overall happiness was already higher in that moment, and it made the wind blowing along Campbell and Hillcrest feel better.

And there was yet another level of higher happiness in that moment. I was about to travel to California. San Francisco and Los Angeles were my destinations. My mother was about to take me on a trip to check out the campuses of Stanford, California Berkley and UCLA. Good gosh I wanted to go to college in California. Even by then it had become a land of endless romanticizing. It was the most beautiful place on earth to me.

So, with that trip a couple days away, and my losing weight, and knowing I now had a friend, well, again, the present and the future felt better.

Then, Sting’s “Fields of Gold” came on that red mustang’s radio. It was released on June 9th. Many years have passed since those summer days, and though the song seems a bit cheesy now, then it was a very moving piece of music that seemed to perfectly enhance all emotions felt in that moment. It was perfect in that moment, and it seems wrong not to mention that this song had elevated my happiness to yet another level, and will forever remind me of those summer days.

Well, there was a fifth upper level. Beer. We were going to get gloriously drunk that night at a keg party. Oy vey. We did. “You cookie monster EXPLETIVE EXPLETIVE!”

Anyways, it doesn’t really matter how everything unfolded thereafter.

Indeed, that California trip was amazing. UCLA was pretty. Disneyland was fun. So was Alcatraz. Cal Berkley I liked a lot. But the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto – wow. It WAS the most beautiful place I’d ever seen, and my desire to go to school there skyrocketed. Thank you for that trip, mom.

And I did lose weight, and get toned up, and strong. That summer I worked out hard. Our whole football team did like never before. We were excited where the new head football coach named Tod Nix was going to take us. He had brought a far more disciplined state to the Pearce Mustang football program than the previous coaches had implemented. I was proud to be a Mustang.

And some girls did like me. But talking about that would be rambling at this point.

In ending I do wish to say that though many uppity kids of North Dallas yuppies didn’t make great classmates, many others did. Though many were so stupid that they couldn’t find Russia on a map, many could. Pearce had many contrasts, and, well, it was what it was.

Still, I’d never send kids to RISD. No way.