Twenty years ago, I was a sophomore at Ursuline High School. Just writing that phrase disturbs me, because I have no idea where the time has gone or how so many years have lapsed without me realizing it.
I spend so much of my time dealing with demographic information that it has become easy to forget that whether I’m discussing Gen Y mobile usage trends, or Baby Boomer social network adoption, or Gen X career management patterns, that I actually do fall into one of those categories. And we’re getting older.
In many ways Facebook actually makes this worse for me. I see a stark difference between my former classmates in elementary school and junior high than my classmates in high school. That’s not shocking: I attended public school (in the under-funded side of town) until 8th grade, and then I switched and started Ursuline as a freshman in 1989 (Class of 93). They were different worlds, and they produced different populations.
In a rough anecdotal comparison, just based on what I see in Facebook alone, I see that my high school classmates almost all ultimately moved away from Santa Rosa (in many cases we left for college and never returned), have far more lucrative careers, and generally took longer to get married and have kids than the people I went to school with during my K-8 years. As is often the case, those who came from money often married those who also came from money. Those who were destined to be successful by sheer force of will and intellect married the same. The inverse is also (usually) true.
But one of the other things that I see on Facebook is that many of my (female) classmates have only recently started having kids — many of them have none over the age of 5. I think this has made it easy for me to forget that we are all now 35, and that it has been 20 years since we roamed the halls of Ursuline High School in our blue and white uniforms during the George H. Bush Administration. As one of the few deliberately childfree one of my classmates, I don’t have growing kids to look at every day to remind me of my age. (Hell, my dog turned 9-years-old last week, and I still can’t believe it.)
Maybe that is part of why I find it so sad that, after 130 years, Ursuline High School announced that they would be closing their doors at the end of this school year. As the world’s least sentimental person and a staunch anti-traditionalist, I wouldn’t have thought that this news would be as disturbing to me as it is. But the more I think about it, the more I suspect that the real issue isn’t sadness about Ursuline closing than it is sadness about getting older.
The truth is, I hated high school. Especially by the time we got to the end of senior year, I was dying to get out of there. The last day I had to wear my uniform, I went home from school that day, changed my clothes and proceeded to light a bon fire in the fireplace and watched in satisfied glee as the white Oxford shirts and herringbone skirts were engulfed in flames.
However, to be fair, there was very little I hated about high school that was Ursuline-specific. Mostly, I just hated high school. There was very little about the ages of 14-18 (24, actually) that I didn’t find painful, and which I wasn’t eager to forget. Part of it may have been my Mom’s death the year before high school started, but whatever the reason, like a Pat Conroy character, I swore I’d never trust anyone who ever thought of high school as a pleasant experience (which just made it highly ironic that I married someone who loved high school).
As a result, I have very few memories of that time in my life, anymore. I see names on Facebook that I know I should know, pictures that seem vaguely familiar if I squint hard enough, who’s biographical information clearly says we were classmates, but I can’t place them. (And since I threw away all of my year books, I can’t even look them up.) With a class of less than 100, I imagine that my poor memory has more to do with choice than overload.
And yet, hearing that tuition at Ursuline has climbed to more than $11k/year shocks me enough to make it obvious why the school can no longer attract enough students to be able to afford to stay open. Yet that saddens me, too.
My husband and I watched Bottle Shock this weekend. For those of us who are old enough to remember growing up in the California wine country when it was still a farming community, it is a great movie to watch. But, like the closing of Ursuline, the movie also reminds me that time has marched on and that my slightly hazy romantic memories are wildly out-dated.
Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino Counties are now the home of big money wine industry agribusiness with the overly-trendy, high-priced tourism and expensive cost of living to match. And while my father’s neighborhood has become more and more gentrified over the years, it’s still the under-funded side of town where you are at least four times more likely to hear people speak Spanish than English.
It’s been almost six years since (the last time) I moved away from Sonoma County. There is something cruelly romantic about the stagnant snap shot created by time and distance. It’s easy to think of things the way they were when you left, and find yourself surprised to discover changes during brief holiday visits. Friends you keep in touch with may work their way out of the frozen image — they get married, divorced, have kids, change careers. And if you are in touch, your mental picture of them can change.
Places are harder, though. You don’t keep in touch with a place. It doesn’t send you Facebook status updates or Christmas cards with this year’s picture on the cover. A place stays the way it was in your mind, no matter how much the individuals you knew there may have changed. So that makes this week’s new about Ursuline a bit of shock (and not even just for those of us who are gone). Of course places change. We know that the individuals all have; we know that our families have; we know that we have. The place felt permanent, though. It felt like it wouldn’t, shouldn’t and hadn’t ever changed (sometimes to our dismay). And now it has.
So thank you to the Ursuline Sisters. You set out to create generations of young women who would take their place in the world with confidence and grace. And for whatever our differences may have ever been (and there were plenty), I still believe that yours was a worthwhile goal, which I’m sorry to see dim.
And as an aging, Generation X alum who takes a lot of comfort in the marketing b.s. about ’50 being the new 30,’ I thank you for one final, educational lesson: fight it though we might, no matter how far away we move or how successful we become, eventually we all do become the older generation who can’t help but ask, “Where has the time gone?”
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