I Remembered His Name Was Jake

The current principal of my old junior high school was free and open to giving me a tour, talking about education in Iowa, and ultimately sharing that one of my old eighth grade classmates now happens to be one of his eighth grade teachers. All of which prompted some unexpected memories of people and experiences I had long ago forgotten or set aside in my memory. That’s what happens when you move around a lot as a kid and don’t go back for three decades. Perhaps the most unexpected and unfortunate memory was that this is the school where I received my first and most lasting fat lip, a puffed up pocket on the left side of my mouth that’s never fully returned to its original size, not since seventh grade.

As the story goes, we were playing flag football and I went up to make a catch. A smaller player, someone smaller than I was at the time, caught my legs as I was going up, which pointed me toward the ground, just as a much bigger boy was barreling toward me. The collision put my face into the ground, teeth cutting into my bottom lip, and a trail of blood from the field to the nearest sink. But for more than thirty years, through multiple moves, multiple schools, multiple people, I never once thought about the boy who plowed into me, other than some hazy vision of that day, and the visible bump on my bottom lip that’s still there today. Frankly, the only photos I ever had from the school were photos of my own class, and the boy wasn’t in my class. So when the current principal walked me to the wall of class photos, where I could see the year before me and after me, I saw his face and immediately remembered his name before even looking down to confirm that it was indeed him. Having never mentioned his name to anyone at any point in thirty years, I still remembered that his name was Jake.