I’m not sure what made me think about this recently, but I got to remembering these three girls in my high school a year ahead of me. Calling them girls is a stretch. They were already more mature than pretty much everybody else, even some teachers.
This group sat in the library in the mornings and talked quietly, dressed neatly and cleanly although not very fashionably, and never seemed to notice anyone else. They were studious and polite if a bit distant in demeanor, I can’t say I knew any of them but I always noted their presence. One of them was Vietnamese. I only knew that because one year some group at school put out a poetry volume. She had written a wonderful poem about how beautiful Vietnam was. This was not terribly long after the US pulled out of Vietnam.
I spent a little time looking up the name of the girl because frankly she was the only one of the group I could identify because of her looks. There was not a lot of diversity in skin color in my high school although to say it was all white doesn’t take into consideration that Cleveland is ethnically diverse in many different ways. Students then very much identified in the same way their parent and grandparents did, but the factors were more about family country of origin and even region of the country, and by religion. Subtleties that aren’t recognized by any checkbox or calculation used to define communities. That is a discussion for a different time.
I really wanted to read the poem again. I am someone who saves and collects. I went through all four of my high school yearbooks, yes after many, many moves I still have all of them. If it seems strange to still have all four yearbooks, I find them much more interesting today than I did back them. I can better see behind the pictures now.
I paged through all the paper ephemera I could find. So far nothing but I’m going to ask around to see if anyone might still have a copy somewhere…I’d really like to read that poem again.
Khatzkel Did It 