Green Sea Turtles

                                                                                                                        Nate Simon

                                                                                                            Ms. Wilson-Scott

                                                                                                                                    5

Everything was intimidating at first. From the massive concrete structures to the seniors on the community theater steps yelling at freshman. I had come from a small private school and never had been exposed to an environment like this. When we moved to Berkeley from Palo Alto, the change was immediately apparent.  Where we live in South Berkeley is not at all similar to the environment in which I had spent most of my life. I had never given any thought to the idea of going to a school like Berkeley. Always assumed that I would stay in the private school track.

The decision would alter the course of the rest of my life. My parents had put it very simply, do you want to go to a private high school, or would you like to go to college? I wasn’t sure if I could get a scholarship, and was damn sure that there was no point in going to a private high school if I went to a community college. The choice for me was Berkeley High.

            I had gone to a public school in my earlier days, but that was only until third grade so at that age even the class sizes were similar to private schools. We were living in Stanford while my parents worked as resident fellows for Stanford. After my dad was fired, he got a job working as the director of a small private music school in North Berkeley; The Crowden School. Because he was the director, I received free tuition and thus my parents decided it was a good idea to take the opportunity to attend private school at no cost. This decision has haunted me for much of my life. I hated the school because of its small class sizes and classical music training. I had never liked the music and could not deal with my class of seventeen after only two years and realized I needed a change. My dad quit the school after my sixth grade year, but forced me to stay. I begged, I pleaded, I yelled, but they wouldn’t budge. I was ready for a change. Would a gigantic school really be the answer? I contemplated whether this was really a good idea.

            Going to Berkeley High was a daunting prospect. Will I fit in? Will I find friends? What will class be like? Will I know anyone? Will I get put in a trashcan? Questions rushed into my head and were replaced with others almost instantly. The whole scene was terrifying.

            My life at The Crowden School had been one filled with disappointment. My parents apparently thought that the best place for a nine-year-old boy, who had just moved to a new town, was a small private school. I made friends almost immediately with all of the fifteen people in my class, but we had all of our periods together, and thus I tired of them almost as quickly. This was only the first year, my outlook swiftly changed from curiosity to prison mentality. How long will I be stuck in here? Is this what school is supposed to be like?

As I pondered how my new life was going to shape up with Berkeley High in the picture, I decided to talk to my sister’s boyfriend, being that I was at his house and I had a fair amount of respect for him.

            “I went to a private catholic school so I don’t think I will be much help,” he said.

            “But you went to high school, right? So you have to know more than me.”

            “Well. I guess, I dunno. Just be true to yourself.”

“That’s the most stereotypical advice I have ever heard. You really aren’t any help.”

“Alright, alright. It doesn’t matter what people think about you, just how you think about yourself.”

“You don’t really get it do you?  I’m looking for something you didn’t hear on television.”

            He didn’t seem to be much assistance. All of his advice seemed to come out of and nineteen eighties era feel-good movie, where the whole family shares a hug at the end. I made an effort to extract whatever I could get from our discourse, but the only useful words I could salvage were “just be yourself”. I tried to interpret this information in a meaningful way. All I could get out of it was that I should not care what other people think about me, and just be true to myself. This still sounded formulaic, but I figured I had nothing else to go on, so I might as well give it a shot.

            As the first day loomed closer, the anxiety continued to increase. The week before, time seemed to slow down. Each day would go by more slowly than the previous one. I could not figure out what to do. The only thing that could make my brain calm down and focus, was his advice, or rather my interpretation of his advice. I ran it though my head again and again, trying to truly embrace it.

After middle school graduation I decided to go to a tennis camp in Carmel. I had just had the conversation with my sister’s boyfriend and figured that this was as good of an opportunity as I would get to try and implement this new world view.

The whole concept was easy enough to understand, but how to make a massive shift in the way I interacted with others? This was a problem. I figured that I should just try to be myself, whatever that meant. About half way through the first week, I was pretty sure I had figured out what it meant to just not give a shit. I didn’t have to be self conscious about what I said, or who I talked to, or how I acted. This was easier said than done, but because I was at camp and I did not think I would ever see any of these people again, it was much easier. By the end of camp everyone I met was either a friend or thought I was one of the weirdest people they had ever met. At least I felt comfortable being me. The real test was till to come, the commencement of my high school career.

The day finally came. I wasn’t ready, but had no choice. My first class was history. The questions resurfaced and flooded my head with doubts. Will I know anyone? The answer was no, not a soul. I walked right before the bell rang. I could hear my heart beating and thought to myself, “shit, if I can hear it, can they?...” I found the card with my name on it and slid quickly into my seat. I sat there quietly waiting to see who would land in area around me. The first kid I talked to had a skater hat, a pair of baggy jeans, and a big nose.

“Hi. I’m Nate,” was the only thing that came to mind.

“Sup, I’m Aria,” he responded

I didn’t seem to be doing very well with the conversation. Luckily the teacher began to introduce herself. She was interrupted by a sound I have come to love, the bell. She had begun her lecture before class had even started. She obviously knew about as much about high school as we did.

She split us up into smaller groups for an icebreaker activity. I got placed in the same group as Aria.

“Now the rules are that everyone has to say their name, and their favorite flavor of ice cream,” Ms. Ummat declared with no emotion that I could decipher.

No one in our group wanted to go first, so Ms. Ummat arbitrarily picked someone. The kid looked both terrified and relieved that after this he was done.

“I’m Evan, and I like chocolate,” the petrified boy stammered.

“I’m Loren and I like chocolate,” the next girl pronounced. She seemed to have much more confidence than Evan.

My turn finally came, and up until that moment I had been mortified about speaking in front of these people I didn’t know, but after seeing that most of them were as scared as I was, the apprehension seemed to melt away.

“I’m Nate and I like Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food ice cream.”

It would seem like an insignificant event to most, but for me this was the beginning to a whole new chapter of my life.

                        As the year progressed, I became more and more comfortable with school and navigating my way through the halls teeming with teenagers. I gradually made more friends, and began to feel at home. My decision to go to Berkeley seemed to be the right one.

             People change, not always for the better, but undoubtlly they change. As I continued to skate through my school experience, I began to take notice of the ways I had personally changed. I didn’t have as much trouble getting up in front of the class to speak when called on.

            I thought I had fully realized and understood the phrase “It doesn’t matter what others think of you, but how you think of yourself”, how wrong I was. After I moved from Palo Alto, I only kept in touch with a few people. I did not think that I would really actually see most of the people I knew even though it its only an hour away driving. I was right. I did not even end up seeing at least half of the people I had continued talking to. One of the few friends that I managed to stay in contact was Zack. I had met him back in kindergarten, and to this day he remains one of my closest friends. I had gotten to know some of his friends pretty well, one in particular; Garth.

            I got a call from Zack the night before he, Garth, and another friend Austin were supposed to make the trip up to Berkeley to stay at my house. My mom screamed upstairs that Zack was on the phone, and as usual I screamed back, that she doesn’t need to yell.

But everything was not usual, far from it.

            I picked up the phone to hear Zack talking to his mom.

            “Zack, what’s going on? You all still coming up?”

            I did not hear anything on the other line, “….Nate, I have to tell you something.”

            “You guys aren’t coming up, are you?” I was annoyed because I had already told another one of my friends that I could not go to his house up in Marin.

            “I really have to tell you something,” he sounded anxious.

            Sill a bit peeved I continued, “what is it?”

            “Garth was in a car crash. He…..he died.” It sounded as though he did not want to say the words for the hope that it was not true.

            I did not know how to respond. One of the only times in my life that I have been truly speechless.

            “Dude….. Dude. What happened?” Not my most intelligent response, but I just could not think of what to say.

            “He was racing on the freeway, and hit something in the road. He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. His head…..his head went through….” I could hear him start to break down.

            “I don’t need the details right now. Holy shit though man. I’ll call you back in a bit.”

            He sounded like he needed some time. I fully understood. I later found out that the windshield frame had embedded itself in his head. That was all I needed to hear. Garth was gone, that was all that mattered. I realized that what other people think of me is so insignificant because I could be gone any second. I had to live in the moment and enjoy everything around me because it could be snatched from me at any time.

            Surprisingly, both my sister’s boyfriend’s pieces of advice had been assimilated into my outlook on life. They seem cliché, but the truth they hold cannot be fully realized easily. It took losing someone for me to understand.