This entry is dedicated to the first graduating class of Coral Way K-8 Center, from 2008. A tribute to our friends, our adventures, our mischiefs, and everything else that we all went through.

PRE – P.S. – click on the title of the entry to see pictures from the last days of school! And, visit www.tompics.tk for my entire photo collection!

“Yaaaaahooooo!!!!!” screamed the students of my school during the last day of classes, as they went racing through the hallways, throwing juice up onto the roof (maybe I’ll put up the vid one of these days). At dismissal time, however, things were a bit more calm, particularly because everyone came to terms with the fact that, well, we’re not coming back to the school next year. We’re not gonna pass through the same color double doors every morning anymore. We’re not going to have the same teachers mortify us; different ones will. We won’t eat the same bad lunch in the same dirty cafeteria anymore’; we’ll do it somewhere else. That’s what was going through everyone’s mind at dismissal time, and without a doubt, these thoughts were one of the reasons why many lingered, as much as possible, around the exit, some crying, many not wanting to leave, all in a pensive mood, until our parents pulled our hairs and ears into the car (along with our bodies too). We did our best to ccme to terms with the uncomfortable truth that we were all growing up, and it was time to leave the K-8 school we’d been at for almost a decade.

It may not have hit me as hard as it hit others; I’d only been at the school since 5th grade. However, I still understood the painstaking task that it must have been for others to comprehend the aforementioned. They’d been there since they were little “tikes” running around stark naked around the pool; since they first learned their alphabet and numbers. They’d come to know all the teachers, they’d come to know the school better than the architects who designed and built it. It was hard.

Now, almost three months afterwards, on the penultimate day of summer vacation 2008, I sit here, at my laptop, typing up this blog entry, and I start to remember all this. It tells me many things, but the most painful one is the fact that we’re growing up. We used to be little kids, whose height didn’t even reach the door knobs, walking in a line, behaving our best, not saying so much as a single syllable to another student so as to not get in trouble and get a time out. Then, in the same halls, years later, we were the “big kids” we’d aspired to be, with facial hair, deeper, but crackly, voices; and other things particular to each gender (:D). We started forming our opinions about things; we came to understand what was beyond the city limits, we learned how babies are really made, and a bunch of other things. We changed, basically. We weren’t the cute little silent kids anymore. We were different.

When I went home the day after that lingering dismissal, I went to the infamous “End of the Year” celebration. Before that, however, I was with two other friends enjoying a hearty meal that’d been prepared for us as a grad gift, of sorts. That was the beginning. It was the beginning of a transitional period. A transitional period that, well, would transition into something new, something unlike what we’d done and experienced. It was the last breath, perhaps, that the little innocence in us gave. We’re “high school-ers” now, we’re freshmen, we’re “grown-ups”. Pretty soon, we won’t be riding bike or the bus to school, we’ll be driving our own cars to school. We have more responsibility now; we can watch PG-13 movies now (legally), and within a few years, the R-rated ones too. We’re cool!

All this might seem like high school’s going to be the time of our lives, and it probably will be. Without a doubt, it’ll be an interesting, fun time. But we must never forget where we all started. Sometimes, we should just sit down, fire up the PC, and look at all the pictures we took the day of the juice incident, the day of the band concert (or the various band concerts, I should say), the day of the field trip to Universal Studios, the day of the Social. Who can forget the History and Geography Bees, Ms. Schenquerman’s wild party. We should do this to just refresh the folder in our mind that’ll store all this forever. We can never forget the times we had with our friends. We might forget our homework, our chores, our responsibilities, and without a doubt, what we had for breakfast this morning; but we’ll never forget this.

Summer 2008 was no longer a closure, but a transition, as aforementioned. After this, there’s no turning back. Sure, we’ll visit our old teachers at every chance we get, but we can never be taught by them again. We can never sit at the same chair and fall asleep at the same lectures ever again. What we can do, however, is appreciate how much those same lectures meant to us. How much those teachers valued us; how much we loved them. Although I’ve been at the school a shorter time than most of my compadres, I think I speak for all of us when we say that forgetting about Coral Way – the good and the bad times, the friends we made, the crazy stuff we did and experienced – and Summer 2008 – water parks, beaches, movies, and maybe movie shoots too (in my case :D) – it’s just not doable.

To the former students of Coral Way K-8 – hope you guys have an awesome time in high school, and college; wish you guys the best of luck in your professional careers, and I hope to see you guys again someday. After all, we’ll all stick together – no matter what, no matter how,

-Tomas at Large
August 16, 2008
[{"document_url": "https://elmonzon.com/2008/08/16/summer-2008-from-the-former-eight-grader-a-precursor-to-something-different-2/", "unformatted_src": "https://tomasatlarge.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/banerelmonzon.png", "src": "https://tomasatlarge.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/banerelmonzon.png", "formatted_filename": "banerelmonzon", "alt_text": "ElMonzon.com", "rendered_width": 1260, "rendered_height": 240}, {"document_url": "https://elmonzon.com/2008/08/16/summer-2008-from-the-former-eight-grader-a-precursor-to-something-different-2/", "unformatted_src": "https://i2.wp.com/lh5.ggpht.com/tomasatlarge/SE_w8I8dAbI/AAAAAAAABGY/60tsbndkGNM/DSC01289.JPG", "src": "https://i2.wp.com/lh5.ggpht.com/tomasatlarge/SE_w8I8dAbI/AAAAAAAABGY/60tsbndkGNM/DSC01289.JPG", "formatted_filename": "DSC"}, null, {"document_url": "https://elmonzon.com/2008/08/16/summer-2008-from-the-former-eight-grader-a-precursor-to-something-different-2/", "unformatted_src": "https://s33.postimg.cc/sm6qiiarv/34063844_10216045904722265_9049922870687301632_n.jpg", "src": "https://s33.postimg.cc/sm6qiiarv/34063844_10216045904722265_9049922870687301632_n.jpg", "alt_text": "34063844_10216045904722265_9049922870687301632_n"}, null]