Young adult fantasy draws power from old high school days
My young adult fantasy academy series is a crusade against government and traditional schooling. But it still brings me some nostalgia.
I found an old high school football program from 2005 the other week at my parents’ place and brought it back home. It’s nothing more than 50 worn-out pieces of paper stapled together at the spine with a few tears in the thin card-like cover if that description makes any sense.
The interior quality is so grainy that you can only see the photos clearly in the right lighting. And you can bet that I’d looked at and showed it off about a hundred times since I found it. Weird, since I didn’t even like school, and today, I’m one of those strong advocates for alternative education as opposed to bureaucratic government or even traditional private “schooling.”
Heck, I started counting down the days until graduation starting in January 2008, about halfway through my junior year of high school. That should show you how much I valued school. Still, it doesn’t stop that nostalgic feeling from stirring every time I flip through those pages.
How strange is it, that something you wanted to leave behind carries some kind of weight? I mean, some say the high school years are the best years of your life. But I don’t believe it. Heck, I got a day job most people only dream of, I’m well known (but not too well known) under multiple names. I recently turned 34, yet I still feel like I’m 17. And that’s a good thing. So yeah, I’m just fine.
The nostalgia for school paradox isn’t quite what it looks like
Some may call it a paradox, but I digress. TC wants to go back to school, he just doesn’t realize it, they say. No, really, I don’t want to be anywhere near a public school and I’d never want to relive those days. They’re gone. The door’s closed. And leaving it for good was akin to when Harry Potter left No. 4 Privet Drive for the last time.
Still, I laughed at the superintendent’s and principal’s messages – “we have a common goal – do what is best for students.” Yeah, right. Fifteen years later when the COVID hysteria hit, all of America saw through that and similar quips.
No, there were no chills of nostalgia that came from being within the building itself, sitting in class with pale yellow, cinder block walls, or rushing between the four-minute bell so I wouldn’t be late for my next class, or standing in a lunch line for twenty minutes only to be fed God knows what was in that food.
Nah, it wasn’t that. Instead, the chills and the emotions came from something, or someone else: the parents and their ‘good luck messages.’ See, the first half of the program depicted the fall sports teams. About halfway through, we had a photo montage of a game we played against another school at Heinz Field of all places – which held the naming rights of the stadium where the Pittsburgh Steelers and Panthers play football.
For the record, we were a small, rural high school in Eastern Ohio, so playing a game in a big city and in a pro football stadium was cool. But it wasn’t even that, despite it being an experience of a lifetime for most. For me, I also walked on the field of the Cleveland Browns two years later, so I got two bites at the apple.
Emotions from the parents’ good luck messages and their meanings
The only reason my parents never placed a good luck message in the back half of that program was because I never let them. But twenty years later, and I wish I had. It’s one of those situations that, as a teenager, you might find it either embarrassing or indifferent. Or, at least that was the case for most of us.
But like I said, it’s been twenty years and a lot of time has passed, even if I felt like life started to speed up that year. Looking back at those messages, you realize something: they’re frozen in time. As I get older and the years fly by even faster than the last, there’s something powerful in those stapled pieces of paper that stays trapped in 2005.
Lord Voldemort once described it as ‘ancient magic,’ if you catch my drift. Albus Dumbledore once explained why one door in the Department of Mysteries stays locked at all times, as it contains such powerful magic – and I’m paraphrasing here.
Now that two decades have gone by since then, not everyone who wrote those messages is still here. Parents have passed, and many of our grandparents have definitely passed, yet those stapled pieces of paper remind us that they were once right by our side, supportive, and attentive.
They came to all the games and felt the same emotions in the stands that we felt on the field. A part of them will always live in that old program, and it’s why I’ll never throw it out. Heck, it wouldn’t surprise me if, three, four, five decades from now, any kid that I have stumbled on it and feels the same thing, even if they were born well after 2005.
Yote Diamondback feels the same in my young adult fantasy series
In my young adult fantasy, The Arcane Prophecy, Yote Diamondback finds it weird that her mom wants to exchange handwritten letters depicting her freshman year at the academy. While this is a non-traditional, alternative schooling environment, the same thing holds true that I mentioned earlier.
As teenagers, we’re stumped. We don’t know how much these ‘good luck messages’ mean at the time, or in Yote’s case, those letters. She’ll never know, or realize their significance at the moment.
But maybe someday, she’ll hear those echoes and those same emotions will come to the forefront…maybe…and this is the part where I rub my hands together like a supervillain. Take that as a hint.
Anyway, holding onto that program’s not about reliving the glory days because, for me, they were never glory days. Instead, it’s about remembering the people who quietly rooted for us, even when we didn’t notice, and knew us way better than any shill for the State claiming “to do what is best for students” ever pretended to.
Want to dive into Yote Diamondback’s story? Check out its free prequel, Arcane Awakenings.
