Читать книгу The Seven Year-Old Pilot - Capt. Steven Archille - Страница 16

I met her on the first day of high school. She was the prettiest, sweetest girl I’d ever seen. She had long brown wavy hair, the most beautiful smile, and the cutest laugh. Her name was Jennifer, and I was elated to learn that she would be in most of the same Scholar’s Academy classes with me, which meant I would get to see and talk to her throughout the day. As the weeks went by and I got to know her better, I liked her even more, but couldn’t find the nerve to tell her. I was afraid she wouldn’t feel the same. I had never been much of a “ladies’ man” and got nervous and tongue-tied around any girl I liked, so I settled for being the friend, while hiding my true feelings out of fear of rejection. Starting with my first big crush on Erica from Mr. Kuck’s fifth grade class, continuing through I.S. 27, and now high school, I had been trying to overcome a feeling of inadequacy around girls. I felt that I was not desirable enough, tall enough, or handsome enough to attract the attention of the girls I liked, a feeling I still struggle with sometimes. I envied the guys who could just walk up to any girl and start talking to them, but I wasn’t one of them. I wished I could’ve be like “The Fonz” from one of my favorite television shows, Happy Days who, at the snap of his fingers, would have the girls all come running to him. However, no matter how much I snapped, they never came running.

Soon after school started, couples started forming, and love (the adolescent kind of love that fourteen-year-olds feel) was in the air. Jennifer did not have a boyfriend, but I thought she was too pretty and popular ever to be interested in me. She was a white Jewish girl from a nice neighborhood, and I was a black kid living in the projects. Having learned the subtle, unwritten rules of society, especially as they related to interracial couples in the States, it seemed a lost cause even to try. How could she possibly ever be into me? I thought. However, socioeconomic class issues and race aside, I was just a boy who liked a girl (a lot), and I promised myself that one day before we graduated, I would find a way to tell her.

My four favorite classes during my freshman year were English, biology, gym, and band, in which I continued to play the trumpet. I thoroughly enjoyed the novels we read in English class, such as Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”, JD Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” and Richard Wright’s “Black Boy”. My love of reading made me look forward to that class every day, and discussions about the novels were always very lively. I was one of the weird kids who actually enjoyed writing essays and book reports, eschewing the “Cliff’s Notes” versions, which were smuggled into school and sold by some enterprising students. I discovered that I was more verbally inclined and stronger in English than in math or science, but I did my best to get through geometry, trigonometry, calculus, and chemistry. I knew that my intended profession involved quite a bit of math, but I hoped that since I would be flying the airplanes and not designing them, that I would be able to escape the more involved math that Aeronautical Engineers had to know. Whatever the case, I resolved to put in whatever extra time and effort was needed to get through math and science. However, English class was a joy, and much like anything one truly enjoys, it ended all too quickly each day, and it was off to math class.

The director of the Scholar’s Academy, Miss Kirsch, taught biology, and I quickly discovered I had an aptitude for it. She was very passionate about her subject and put lots of work into her lectures. She used visual aids and different kinds of media to keep the class fresh and interesting, and her passion was contagious. As I look back, she, like Mr. Kuck before her, encouraged me to dream big, saying that if I worked hard, nothing could keep me from becoming a pilot one-day.

My band teacher Mr. McCarthy, a tall, slim, grey-haired Irish gentleman in his early fifties, was also passionate about his class and had an intense love for classical music, which he tried his best to transfer to his students. While growing up in 1980’s New York City, Betty and I had been at the epicenter of the rise of Hip-Hop and had grown to love it with a passion. Classical music grew to become a very close second for me and still is to this day, in large part due to Mr. McCarthy and my years in the high school band.

I dove into high school fully aware that I was less than four years away from starting college and my flying lessons. From the very beginning of high school, the dreaded Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) had been looming large on the horizon because along with my high school grades, it would be used by colleges to decide whether to admit me. Knowing that doing well in my classes and on the SATs would be the key to my future dream of flying, helped me to stay focused. With my goal in mind, I settled into my daily routine of waking up early, taking the thirty-minute bus ride to school, going to my classes, taking the thirty-minute bus ride home, doing my school assignments, watching a little television, going to sleep, and starting the cycle again the next day. Mom and Dad always reminded my siblings and me that our education was something no one could ever take away from us.