In the middle of a sad town, in the middle of a sad street, sat an unnecessarily large house with a dusty, overgrown backyard\u2014the kind of backyard that was home to discarded flat tires and tumbleweeds\u2014that contained one algae ridden, Grecian style swimming pool (the reason my father had purchased this house), and a mammoth avocado tree that seemed somehow able to throw its unwanted fruit into the deep end.\u00a0 Here, in Santa Ana, California I was thrust into my third, and not my last, school for my sixth\u00a0grade year. Willard Junior High School is located near downtown Santa Ana, and offered grades sixth\u00a0through ninth, and the students were giants in comparison to my gangly twelve year old self.<\/p>\n
At Willard, I became an avid runner.\u00a0 As the last bell sounded, I would burst forth through the doors at top speed, my white Keds gripping the hot asphalt to the best of their ability, attempting to out run whom ever had decided that I would be their target for the day.\u00a0 I would run the mile back to my house usually with one or two kids\u00a0in tow. Kids that if they caught me, would knock me around a bit, and then steal whatever meager amount of cash I had on me.\u00a0 Kids that hated simply because I was awkward and new.\u00a0I use the term \u201ckids\u201d loosely as I am not sure how old any of the people who tormented me after-school actually were.\u00a0 The girls all looked like they were in their early 20\u2019s, their bangs cemented straight-up in some gravity defying miracle that required equal parts Aqua-Net and sheer determination, eyebrows plucked until there was only one or two hairs left and then miraculously drawn back on with a pencil at odd angles and points, and a wardrobe that always contained the whitest of the white shirts ever made.\u00a0 The boys\u00a0tried<\/em>\u00a0to look like they were in their early 20\u2019s but instead had that awkward haven\u2019t-quite-figured-out-puberty thing happening, greasy, matted hair, oddly shaped peach fuzz mustaches that seemed geometrically impossible and looked more like dirt than an actual mustache, and the most vile of all vocabularies\u2014vocabularies so crass that truck drivers, construction workers, and even strip-club aficionados would have blushed if within ear shot.<\/p>\n The after school marathons grew exhausting and after a few months of non-stop torment, I took it upon myself to extend my weekends by skipping multiple days of class each week,\u00a0which was actually quite easy to do.\u00a0Willard Junior High had so many students that their truancy department (yep, they had an entire department) did not seem too concerned with the authenticity of a note from a parent\u2014if you gave it a moderate effort, they would excuse your absence.\u00a0 I had my father\u2019s signature down pat, even his trademark swoop of the S in his first name (Steven).<\/p>\n During the first few weeks in our sad new home, my father had hired a maintenance staff to care for the malaria ridden pool in the backyard, as well as landscapers to mold our desert wasteland into a tropical oasis; but what he had really done was provide me with the most luxurious of spaces to lounge while not attending class.\u00a0 I spent hours in my watery refuge floating on air-mattresses, practicing cannonballs, mastering freestyle and butterfly strokes, and my favorite pass time, diving for the avocados that had sunk to the bottom of the deep end; I could hold my breath for what seemed like hours.<\/p>\n It was during one of these underwater retrieval missions that my father caught me playing hooky.\u00a0 I had not heard his car pull into the driveway; I was searching for that one elusive avocado that seemed to be intentionally evading me.\u00a0 I am not sure how long he had been home before he noticed the sliding glass door open.\u00a0 I do not know if it was my hot pink cassette stereo playing Depeche Mode that gave me away, or if he had happened to walk into the house just as I had jumped into the pool.\u00a0 But I saw him as I looked up from the bottom of the deep end.\u00a0 His body swayed and shimmered through the several feet of chlorinated water.\u00a0 If I stayed under the water he could not yell.\u00a0 If I stayed under the water I would not have to explain why I was not in school.\u00a0 If I could just hold my breath for just a little longer.<\/p>\n Stig Severinson, holds the current world record for holding his breath underwater for twenty-two minutes[1]<\/sup><\/sup>, I lasted for maybe two before my lungs felt like they were going to punch their way out of my chest and swim to the surface of their own volition.\u00a0\u00a0 But something amazing happened once I emerged from the depths of the pool with that last tricky avocado in my hand; my father did not yell or scream, he simply asked me why.\u00a0 And I told him.\u00a0 I told him about my daily race home.\u00a0 I told him about how scared I was all the time.\u00a0 I told him everything he had failed to notice since we had moved into that sad house, on that sad street, in that saddest of California towns.\u00a0 That night I made us guacamole to accompany our dinner on the back patio, it would be one of our last dinners at that house.\u00a0 We moved a few weeks later.<\/p>\n [1] http:\/\/www.guinnessworldrecords.com\/world-records\/1000\/longest-time-breath-held-voluntarily-%28male%29<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the middle of a sad town, in the middle of a sad street, sat an unnecessarily large house with a dusty, overgrown backyard—the kind of backyard that was home to discarded flat tires and tumbleweeds—that contained one algae ridden,… Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":939,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/939"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/losttime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}