School days: Merely a legend in my own mind?

Here’s what I realized after poring through five boxes of my old school papers last week in Minnesota: My perception of my childhood doesn’t jive with what those papers revealed.

Take my third-grade report card, for example. Mrs. Bergan gave me a B+ in conduct. How could this be, I wondered. I recalled myself as an angelic student, always attentive, eyes on the blackboard. I’m sure there was a halo hovering somewhere overhead.

The reality is that I probably was passing notes to friends, fidgeting in my desk and giggling with the girls as we all made eyes at the cute boys.

I also had suppressed the memory of getting a C+ in algebra. In fact, I told my own kids I’d never gotten anything lower than a B; that was a big fat lie.

And those high-school English compositions I thought were Pulitzer Prize-worthy? Well, a few may have deserved the A’s I got, but in hindsight they weren’t THAT great. Thank goodness my writing improved by the time freshman English rolled around at Moorhead State. Somehow I’d saved all those compositions, too, and I plucked out a couple to keep.

My mother, a self-described pack rat, had saved every band concert program, every ribbon I’d won in 4-H, every birthday card I got, my little handprint smushed into a plaster disk. Much of the memorabilia wasn’t that hard to part with. Even so, I kept more than I should have.

I cracked open my old diary that began in junior high in 1969 and continued through 1972. There were some real gems scrawled in there, but most of it was typical young teenage girl stuff — who I was madly in love with, which girls were back-stabbers, details about my tried-and-true friends.

My senior memory book had sentiments from classmates about events I absolutely cannot recall happening.

“I’ll never forget Fern Beach,” my best friend wrote. I’m guessing we spotted a couple of hot guys on the beach during a stay at her family’s lake cottage. But I seriously don’t remember talking to any boys or anything at all happening at Fern Beach, and I’d remember something like that, wouldn’t I?

Among the most sentimental items I saved were personal letters from family members and friends through the years. My youngest brother, who was just 8 when I was living in Austria for a year, sent me the most endearing letter when he got his own room for the first time and told how proud he was of his new digs.

I also saved a lot of my pencil drawings from high-school art class because — not that I’m boasting — they were much better than I remember. One sketch of my oldest brother in his nerdy 1960s-era black glasses certainly had to be saved for posterity if not blackmail purposes.

I pared five boxes into one, and there are many, many more boxes still in storage at our farm. I’m the last of the four siblings to tackle the task of throwing away the physical evidence of our childhood.

Each of my three brothers had his own style with the dispensing of the stuff. One threw away the boxes without even looking at them; another held his own ceremony, tossing things in a bonfire as his ogled and cooed over them one last time; the third brother couldn’t part with much and mailed way too many boxes to his place in Connecticut.

My plan is to take a road trip this summer to haul these priceless artifacts across two states and then store them for decades to come, probably until my children tell me it’s time to get rid of all that junk.

And I have to get in touch with my best friend from high school and find out if she can remember what really did happen at Fern Beach.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.