Seated Alphabetically

I would have to say that anyone who I became good friends with in high school generally didn't have a last name that started with a letter past "G." This was no doubt due to the fact that in homeroom we were seated alphabetically.

My "D" put me in the first seat in the second column, and immediately to the left of the fellow whose "A" led us all off in the first seat in the first column. We became close enough friends to usually have lunch together in a room where you ate lunch if you brought your own. For some time I guess he and I did bring our own, and did share a common lunch period, which in that school could start as early as 10:30. (Luckily I never drew that time slot.)

So, when my long ago lunch-mate posted a query asking to hear from anyone in our class in the alumni newsletter, I smiled at the name I knew, and immediately connected via e-mail.

After the biographical catching-up and usual exchanges I mentioned he probably wasn't going to hear from anyone else whose last name started with a letter past "G." That's just the way it was. Seated in a homeroom, the same way for three years, I came to be friendly with no one myself past the letter "L."

Whether this arrangement has prevented any of us from being able to boast that we sat next to, or near someone who won a Nobel or Pulitzer, I don't know. It may also be keeping us from saying we never sat near someone who has proved to be a publicized maniac. Good things can come out of all things, somehow.

A few weeks passed, and my buddy got back to me to tell me I was right. The only other person he heard from was someone we both knew whose last name started with a "G."

The whole part of being seated alphabetically came back to me again when I read a story in the NYT about the songwriter E.Y. Harburg, who is best known for writing "Over the Rainbow," featured in "The Wizard of Oz" and of course the signature song for Judy Garland.  He wrote other standards as well. "April in Paris," for one.

For someone of Harburg's late 19th century birth he had fairly typical origins for those who became prominent in entertainment: growing up on the Lower East side of Manhattan, and going to a NYC school, where thanks to the alphabetical seating system long favored by NYC schools, he sat next to Ira Gershwin, who of course became a songwriter of some note himself.

The high school my friend and I attended was also a NYC school (all boys then), not quite on the Lower East Side, but tucked away on East 15th Street. In today's parlance, it would be described as being "Lower East Side Adjacent," I guess.

It's now occurred to me that if my friend and I attended that school decades before, we might have been able to say we used to have lunch with Jimmy Cagney. But only of course if he brought his own.

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