My book is shipping, and some reflections on high school

Just got word from my editor today that my VPN-1/FireWall-1 NG book is finally in the stores! I should be getting a fully bound copy tomorrow. amazon.com is supposedly shipping the books now. She also finally tracked down the Portuguese translation of my first book, which I only knew about because it was listed on my royalty statements. It took her a while, but she finally found it and I’ll have copies of that soon.

This evening I got an email from an old friend in High School — someone I hadn’t heard from in over 10 years. It wasn’t someone from my graduating class (else I might have saw them at our 10-year reunion a few years back), but someone from the next year that I was friends with. Unfortunately, that was pretty typical — a lot of my friends were either in the year ahead or the year behind, not in 1991. But then again, that seemed to be kind of an odd year.

HPA is a special place. It’s a small private school nestled in Waimea (Kamuela on the maps) on the Big Island of Hawaii. About half the 300-or-so students board, and are from all parts of the world, others are “day students” who live on the island. The cost of tuition rivals many colleges, but both the academic and the interpersonal opportunities are worth it. I had to receive financial aid to go there, and I’m thankful my mom made the sacrifices she did for me to go there.

One of the things I got in going to HPA is a great sense of Ohana, the Hawaiian word for family. Faculty, staff, and students are all a kind of family. If you took the boarding route, you got a much stronger sense of this since you not only sat in class with these people, but you also lived with them. The faculty lived in the dorms along with the students. Everyone basically knew everyone else. Some people quite literally grew up together since HPA is a K thru 12 school. “Classes” in the sense of graduating year were usually fairly close, though the Class of 1991 was not. Our class, as a whole, didn’t see to “get it” at any point in time. The people that actually came to the 10-year reunion were among the ones that “got it.”

Our senior year brought a new headmaster. He didn’t seem to “get it” either, and was shown the door after we graduated. One of the students referred to this character as a “plastic Ken doll,” and he kinda had that feel to him — nothing really “there.” Among other idiotic things he did, he replaced a long-time faculty member with someone else who also didn’t get it. I’m not going to say that he was responsible for our class not “getting it,” because we were already on that path, but it didn’t inspire us to “get it,” either. During my visit to HPA at the 10-year reunion, I briefly discussed that headmaster with then-current headmaster John Colson (who was at HPA when I was there). He referred to that year as a dark chapter in HPA’s history, primary due to that headmaster.

It’s like that old Paul Simon song:

Time it was, And what a time it was, It was. . .
A time of innocence, A time of confidences.
Long ago it must be, I have a photograph.
Preserve your memories, They’re all that’s left you.

tags: vpn-1, firewall-1, hpa