We were sitting around the family dinner table that night in late September when my father called for our attention.  Then, as easily as he might announce a family outing to a movie theater next week, he told his children that we were moving from Indiana.  To another state.  In mid-December.

I was horrified.  This could not be happening.

Dad explained that he had taken a new job at a major architectural firm in Minneapolis, starting in only a few weeks, and that Mom and the kids would follow him to Minnesota at the Christmas school break in three months.  In the interim, he would shop for a house for the family.

I was 15 and I had just begun my junior year in high school.

My reaction to the news was as odd as it was to be expected.  Expected because I was being uprooted from everything that I knew:  my lifelong house, my neighborhood, my friends, my parish . . . my high school.  Odd because I had largely experienced my first two high school years as scarcely including me.  I felt marginalized and disconnected there.  I wasn’t a ghost, I was more a passerby.  More in the school than of the school.  In the lingo of the day, I definitely was not “cool.”  But at that dinner table moment, I desperately wanted to stay in it.

I had been bullied a couple of times in my frosh year, but that wasn’t the real problem.  The problem was that the strong social hierarchies in the school were built, first, around boys’ athletic achievement (which correlated highly with holding leadership positions in the class), and second, around academic achievement, and I had neither going for me.  I was acutely aware of this.  In a very real and personal sense, for my first two years in high school, I had no future there.  To me, especially as a boy in that era, it was all letter jackets, cheerleaders, and honors students at the center, and I was consigned to the distant bleachers.

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My sensitivity to my low standing had much more to do with my family experiences than with the culture of the school.  (Where, it must be said, most of my classmates were good kids and where I had some friends.)  At home, as I have explained elsewhere, my father’s serial pattern of abandoning the family, only to return whenever he wanted, had wrecked any sense of security for the rest of us, to say nothing of good child-rearing.   I was powerless to change any of that.  Drowning in that drama, I was a cipher in my own home.

My reaction from sixth grade on was to retreat into escapist activities at home, from making up private games I could play by myself to watching Johnny Carson’s comedy on the Tonight Show until 1 a.m. every weekday night.  These substituted for my homework, and I evolved from being a very strong student in my first years of elementary school to being a very mediocre one.  Every day I arrived at school poorly prepared and tired from lack of sleep.

My father had no interest in sports, so taught his children none of them, and we lived in the wooded countryside outside of town where–in my early years–there were few kids around with whom to make teams and compete.  So I was no athlete either.  There is no better example of this than my failed tryout for my elementary school’s eighth-grade basketball team.  In a state in which basketball evokes a religious-like fervor among its inhabitants, I did not yet know that you had to dribble the ball to move around with it.

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Following that failure came high school.  The social status system of the school quickly became obvious to me.  And, I must say, I made an effort to join in, no doubt to compensate for my alienation at home.  Having finally gotten the message about dribbling, I tried out for the freshman basketball team in the fall.  And failed to make it.  In the spring I joined the freshman baseball team, another sport I had never played competitively before, and made the team only because everyone made it.  I had one at-bat that season and contributed an out.

In my sophomore year, I tried again to make the basketball team, this time the B-Team.  Again I failed.  I also applied to join the Key Club, a prominent boys’ community service group.  My application was rejected by the members.  I played on the tennis B-Team that spring–again, everyone was allowed to play on it–but even that experience was cut off when an appendectomy ended my season early.  Meanwhile, my disinterest in classrooms and homework continued, along with the turmoil at home.

Something happened the following summer.  I don’t recall, really, why or how, but I decided to see if I could be any good at tennis.  I had no coach, nor anyone in my neighborhood to play with, but I figured I could enter open tournaments in the city and play players much better (and often older) than I was, and that alone should improve my skills.  And so I did.  I lost every match that summer.  Every one.  But the plan had worked.  By the end of the summer I was the best tennis player returning to my high school.  I knew this because the best returning player from the previous year’s tennis team was a friend.  And after my summer of losing tournament tennis, I asked him to play with me before school started in the fall.  And he could no longer beat me.  I won every match.

That’s why I was so anguished when my father announced we were moving in the middle of my junior year.  I was slated to be the Number One tennis player on the varsity team, and would therefore at least crack the letter jacket barrier.  I would no longer be a cipher.  If my home life was a mess, finally I would have a place where I would feel I belonged.

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After begging my parents to at least allow me to finish my junior year (so that I could make my athletic mark in the spring, but I did not explain this to them)–I could live with some friend’s family, I promised them–I faced the realization that my plan had failed.  As no one yet had any idea of where we would be living or where I would be going to school the coming January, for all I knew my aim to finally be “someone” was simply dashed.

But in the last days before we left Indiana, another thought visited.  While walking down the road from my home one afternoon, it occurred to me that–whatever else–starting at a new high school would give me a chance at a do-over.  After all, I would have a blank slate in a new school, not followed in an obvious way by the low status that I felt.  I did not know what lay ahead, but couldn’t the fates swing so that I felt more, well, at home?  Only days later that vague hope dropped me just outside of Minneapolis in the heart of a Minnesota winter.

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Just after New Year’s Day, 1966, I arrived for my first day at the new school.  Its profile was much like that of my “old” school.  Both were smaller high schools, each with but several hundred students.  Boys’ athletics were front and center at both (neither school had girls’ sports).  In fact, the new school was in the middle of a year in which it would win conference titles in football, basketball, and track and field.  The basketball team was one of the best in the state regardless of school size.  Academics were also a priority, something I deduced from the first friend I made that first day, who turned out to be the top student in the junior class.

One modest difference I noticed, though:  The new school had no tennis team.

So I joined the varsity basketball team three weeks after I had entered the school.

I should explain.  During my first 10 days in the school, by happenstance I met three underclassmen who were members of the team.  When they learned I had just moved from Indiana, they told me I should join the team.  When I demurred, saying I did not play basketball, one of them pushed on and said, “C’mon, you have to play basketball!  You’re from Indiana!”  And again he urged me to come to practice.  For me, it was a real through-the-looking-glass moment.  Up was down, in was out, and I was being drafted by strangers into a sport that I had only failed at and given up on.

A couple of afternoons later, I stuck my toe in.  I went simply to observe the varsity practice from atop the bleachers.  If I had never played organized basketball, I had seen plenty of good high school basketball during my years in Indiana.  And so I knew what I was seeing.  These guys were good, very, very good.  Big, quick, athletic, accurate, all of it.  (A few weeks later the team would beat the state’s top-ranked and unbeaten Catholic school team by 11 points on their court.  And that team had two players who would go on to be drafted into the professional National Basketball Association.)

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Here’s what I thought.  While it didn’t make any athletic sense to me, I figured that, if by some miracle I was allowed to participate, joining the team would be a way to meet more students at my new school.  Even if my visit was short and the coach quickly cut me from practice.   So I took the chance the next afternoon, went to the practice, and asked him if I could join in.  He agreed without questioning me and gave me a practice uniform.  This was different.

At that first practice, and shocking to me, he inserted me into a full-court scrimmage with the second team, competing against the first team.  Having previously abandoned the sport–and so being wildly out of shape–and not knowing any of the team’s plays on offense, and having no confidence . . . well, things were moving too fast for me to dwell on things like that.  Every time a teammate threw me the ball, I was instantly out of options.  I didn’t know whom to pass it on to, or where on the floor to take the ball (dribbling!).  In my mind’s eye the court is frozen, everybody in their place, and I’m holding the ball some 22-25 feet from the basket.  Given that distance, no one was guarding me very closely.  So every time I was passed the ball–every time–I just shot it.  I made three of the five shots I took, and appeared to have passed the test.

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I stayed with the team as a practice player for the rest of my junior year and made the team as a player the next year, when I became a top reserve and once even led the team in scoring.  No star, to be sure, but the point is, things like that kept happening to me during my 18 months in the school.  In the spring of my junior year, only a few months after I had arrived, I was nominated to be class president for the following year, and narrowly lost the vote to a popular female classmate.  My first-ever (and only) high school girlfriend was elected homecoming queen our senior year.  With a few friends, I was able to start the school’s first tennis team that year.  I played the Number One position.

The only weight I was dragging in school was academic.  The grades that followed me to Minnesota ranked me in the lower half of my new junior class.  Upon learning this unsettling fact–I reckoned that I wouldn’t get into college!–I reworked my priorities and ultimately graduated in the top third of my class.

It was as if someone or something had flipped my script during my family’s drive from Indiana to Minnesota.  As if I had landed in my own version of The Truman Show, but with an upbeat storyline.

Except that things were still hell at home.

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Epilogue.   If I hadn’t lived these experiences, I would not have believed they were realistic.  I had felt mostly like the same “me” throughout my high school years.  But of course I wasn’t.  On the outside, I had grown physically and had developed greater athletic coordination, something of which I was little aware.  On the inside, I remained insecure.  But less so.  The new school had absorbed me into its social fabric from the outset, giving me a place where I felt I belonged.   I suspect this had something to do with the school’s less rigid hierarchies of popularity.  Instead, it consisted more of cross-cutting friendship groups that contained kids of all sorts, whether their interests were in athletics, the arts, academic achievement, or other things.

Looking back with the wisdom of the years, I see also that my experiences had to do with something even less obvious, something to do with me.  I see a kid who had kept running into failures–call them barriers–but who kept running at them.  A persistent kid willing to chance it.  A kid looking for something.  A kid who had little choice but to do so.

A kid who had, after all, been forcefully propelled from the security of home.