MEMORIES OF HIGH SCHOOL, AND RED OZIER DOGWOOD BERRIES

RED OSZIER DOGWOOD BERRIES

Friday, 7:45 AM.  61 degrees F, wind variable and mostly calm.  The sky is cloudless but very hazy.  The humidity is 82% and the barometer is trending up, currently at 30.03".

   We leave shortly for Milwaukee and my 60th High School Class reunion.  Don't ask me where the time went.  Over the years I have attended perhaps half of the five-year reunions, and didn't make it to the last one.  It has become more and more matter of seeing who has survived, but on the whole it is a long-lived and pretty sturdy group.  For one thing, I don't think any of the Nathan Hale Class of 1954 were killed in war, which is a blessing.  As for myself I was too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam (unless I had become professional military, which I did not). 

   I always approach these reunions with some hesitancy, since high school was not a happy time of my life, as it was accompanied by the death of my father and a lot of consequent economic and other personal problems.  However I was, and remain, a survivor, and do have some good memories of those years, although as someone once said, "High School is one of those experiences one is happy to have had, but that doesn't mean you would want to do it over again."

   In anticipation of the event I have thought a lot of late about my high school teachers, a few of whom stand out in memory.  There was Miss Bachhuber, who taught Latin, which I took without having a clue as to why I did so.  I remember once being asked to translate a portion of Cesar's Gallic Wars, after which she said, "Mr. Ode, that is the most interesting translation of Cesar I have ever heard."  "Unfortunately, it is also the least accurate."  To which I replied something to the effect that its was "obviously a translation in the modern idiom."  Ms. Bachhuber might be interested if she were still with us,  to know that for the last fifty years or more I have used Latin every day in my biology-based profession (but don't ask me to decline a verb).

   Then there was Mr. Roberts, whom we all called "Pinky," a rotund little English teacher, who tried to introduce us to  various concepts of social justice through his rather melodramatic poetry readings, one of which decried the terrible lives of coal miners who never saw the light of day.  I of course announced to him and the class that the unionized miners made $2.00 per hour (a princely sum at that time) and that as soon as I graduated I was heading to Pennsylvania to work the mines.  I never was much of a bleeding heart.
   Then there was Miss Meyne,  a brilliant, long-suffering woman who tried to teach social studies to kids who were for the most part, at least the boys, a confederation of dunces.  She dressed oddly...she sometimes wore spats...she should have been a college professor.  I remember the jocks limping into class, whining, "Oh, my knee, my knee."  

   I could go on, but won't, at least for now.

   The red-ozier dogwood shrubs, Cornus stolonifera, in the dogwood family (Cornaceae) have ripe fruit.  The opposite, toothless leaves with dominant venation and the reddish twigs offer a pretty certain identification, as do the white to lead-collored clusters of berries, each of which has a black dot at the apex.  The berry has a single more-or-less round seed.  The taste is very bitter and astringent, and although they are not poisonous one is not  likely to eat very many.