Some names have been changed to protect the innocent

School has been in session for almost a week, and my oldest son Cameron, a strapping 15 year old, comes home each day STARVING. I well remember that after-school ravenous feeling myself. But as Cam is tucking into a tuna-on-toasted multigrain, I find I’m hungry too.

Not for food, but for intel.

I need the ins and outs of his day. Who did he talk to? What embarrassments happened in English class…events that soon, very thankfully, will be pegged as “so yesterday?” What boy/girl chemistry sprouted in the biology lab?

To me, Cameron’s academics are a distant second to the larger lessons of high school -- those involving the dirty, sticky mess of the real world. It’s an education I live all over again.

Cam dishes about who fails to bring lunch each day, which garage bands have formed, which have split, which kid has the most admirers. (Yes, there's an ongoing contest about whose domain enjoys the most fluttering female eyelashes.)

The conversation comes alive when Cameron chats with a friend, both seated at our dining room table (conveniently within eye- and ear-shot of the kitchen. Oh, I do love the person who designed this house.) They speak freely.

“Doesn’t it seem like all the kids who went to [a neighboring middle school] have speech impediments?”
“Yeah! What’s up with that?”

This sparks a collaborative list of maybe 15 kids and what exactly they have trouble saying. Rs and Ss are at the core of most of these, but there’s an odd one thrown in here or there, like the inability to say “red ribbons” or “gym locker.”

I can’t quite tell if the issue is with the speakers, or the listeners. No matter. I’m learning that whatever a teenager perceives, incredible or quirky, becomes reality, plain and simple.

For at least 30 seconds. Or until next week, which is the same as forever.

“I hear in swimming class Aaron Simpson thrashes in the water. He never seems to get anywhere. It’s hilarious. How does that even work?”
“Dude! I know it. He was in my class. I had to count his laps and it was pretty slow going. Painful.”
“I heard that on the first day, Harrison jumped in the pool and then started to drown, so the teacher had to jump in to save him. Fully dressed!”

This one I know is true. I’m relieved that the teacher was on his game. Pools plus teenagers can equal some pretty disastrous results.

Pretty soon, a portly man walks down the sidewalk, passing by our dining room window. The boys take notice.

“Hey, doesn’t that look just like Mr. Akin, the science teacher?”
“Oooooh, yeah. Except Akin’s more ripped.”
“Yeah. He and Mr. Stewart run to the gym after class and curl one-hundreds every day.”

I giggle a little at this. I don’t know these men, but the image in my mind is vivid. Men with big bellies, puffing under the weights while chatting casually about photosynthesis.

It’s delicious to be on this side of high school, peering in. I envy the experience of growing up, yet shiver at the thought of doing it all over again. My son’s chatter reminds me that high school is a testing ground – a time to fertilize connections between tiny buds of life and the grander scheme of things.

Having just poked up from the firm, comforting earth of early childhood when family is life’s only reference, high school attacks like harsh sunlight, drenching rain and threatening wind, all at once. Life-giving, but scary too.

And once that blossom opens to the sky, rooted but growing upward every single minute, high school becomes a time to recognize the foibles of others, comparing them to our own. Those we can control (like jumping into a pool), and those we can’t (like spraying spit when we say “fish and chips”). That’s the extracurricular education that grows naturally from boys beginning to take notice of their world.

Thankfully, this gentle ribbing is as far as it goes for Cameron and his friend. At least while I’m listening.

I know that all too soon, Cameron and his pals will be off in college, living their lives, and I’ll have precious few chances to hear their conversations. But for now, my ears are open, and I’m listening for all I’m worth. You never know what I might learn.