class of '01.

Chad was an unpopular kid who had one good idea. In the fifth grade, he decided to start up a class newspaper. Mrs. Bolick, who was an excellent teacher for encouraging ambition in her students, allowed him to take up class time to meet with whatever kids showed interest in the paper. I was supremely jealous for not coming up with the idea for the paper myself, but I still wanted in on it. Chad was editor, of course, because he thought of it and we all knew that "editor" was the most important title in a newspaper. I was the only one with access to adequate technology to create a typed document (this was 1994), and so I was designated the typist. I also volunteered to be a horoscope columnist, because it sounded fun. My friend Alisha became the weather girl, and another kid was the sports columnist. Seems like a kid named John was some sort of generic feature writer.

We decided to name the paper Class of '01, because in 1994, the idea of the millenium was still pretty novel. Unfortunately, that was my idea, though I place some of the blame on my colleagues for not coming up with anything better. Surely that would have been easy, because that was a pretty lame name. We thought it sounded very grown-up, because here we were at eleven and we were already looking forward to our bright futures. I get irritated now whenever I see campus graffiti that was put there by freshmen, their graduation dates seeming so impossibly far away, but I suppose I trumped them all in that crime a long time ago.

My job as typist was to collect articles from everyone, then combine them in some sort of format and order while checking and correcting errors, and create a master copy of each week's edition. I was doing this on my dad's word processor. The term "word processor" does not mean " a copy of Microsoft Word on a computer." It means "an electric typerwriter with a fancy text-only screen." Considering the technology and the typist were both quite young, putting together the one-sheet (front and back) paper every week took considerable time. Chad, as editor, performed his part by asking Mrs. Bolick to make copies of my finished product and then distributing them to our classmates.

Okay, I'm griping here, but I really took this job upon myself and was happy to do it. I am amazed at my eleven-year-old self, she who took on all this extra work for some other kid's good idea. I try to think now whether I've done anything even in the past ten years that was even close to this kind of extracurricular work. (*pauses to blink at blog for a few moments*) Oh. Moving on.

Writing the horoscopes was easy. For a while, I would look in the Lenoir News-Topic for inspiration, but after a while, I just started making them up rather than plagiarizing the stuff other people made up. I was only eleven, but even I knew that you just had to be sorta vague to have a good success rating in terms of horoscopes. After maybe two issues, Alisha got sick of the weather (also copied from the News-Topic), and so I handed over the horoscopes. See, I had a bigger dream; I wanted Ann Landers' job.

Chad announced that there would be a new column in the paper, an advice column. We had decided to keep the identity of the advisor anonymous, so as to encourage my classmates to feel more comfortable asking for advice. We installed a submission box in the form of a mutilated shoe box with a sign on it. We even used a secret advice column name - Dear Jerri. It was all very secretive and exciting, until the day Chad handed me the submission box to take home in front of the entire class. Dear Jerri was still a moderate success, for reasons which completely escape me now. There were lots of questions, little things about what to do if someone is teasing you or how to talk to a boy that you like. Jerri's advice to handle teasing was to tell a joke back to deflect attention. This advice so reeks of me that I shake my head at how little I have changed in thirteen years. I would like to note that I still follow this advice, and it's quite solid.

And then the year was over and the paper died with our elementary school selves. I think Chad tried to revive it the next year without me, but found it difficult to be an editor-in-chief without an accomplished typist. Now it's thirteen years past, the members of the class of '01 have all gone on to graduate (some of us even in 2001) and start their real lives. I haven't heard that any of them are journalists, but I heard that one of them blogs.

I'd be willing to wager that few, if any, of my classmates remember the fifth-grade paper at all. I realize though that it was fairly significant for me, perhaps because I did so much work on it. I bet if I looked not very hard at all in my closet, I could still find some back issues (as if there were any other kind) of Class of '01. Of course, I bet if I looked not very hard at all in my closet, I'd find a lot of stupid crap that I kept, so maybe I'm looking for significance where there is none. It wouldn't be the first time. I mean, I used to be a horoscope writer.