A long line of cars, inching my way onto Fourth Avenue SE as if I was trying to barge my way onto Interstate 494 from I-35 and the relentless marching of I.J. Holton Intermediate School students as they broke for their first exercise of the year.

Yep, a new school year started Tuesday and if at least one high schooler showed up in sweats and hair that proudly and brashly proclaimed to the world, “I don’t live by your rules of normal,” then it’s a successful first day.

I usually hit one of the schools every year for that first day of loosely organized chaos as students, parents and probably more than a few teachers battle to find their room. In all of these years of covering the first day I’ve only had one day where a student — probably new — asked me to help him find his room.

The kid had fear written all over his face and when I found a teacher to help I’m pretty sure she had that same fear.

I kid of course — that fear might have been a little more than the student.

This year, as I wandered the halls of Banfield Elementary School looking for those shots of parents taking pictures of their kids or a member of faculty fist-bumping returning students, I thought about that first day and how I don’t remember a single one of my own. I certainly don’t remember my parents taking photos of me on every first day, but then again, what was the point?

There was no Facebook, no cell phones and really I’m not sure who really wanted to see my mug anyway. Both of my parents were teachers and people saw this shrine to unkempt hair most every day anyway. I didn’t change that much except perhaps that first year where I decided that girls — for all the good it did — were pretty keen and that maybe I should familiarize myself with a comb.

Now that I think a little harder, I don’t remember any of my first days except perhaps the first day when I was officially a junior high student.

Our school was pretty small as small schools go. By the the time I finished my time in school I graduated with a total of 13. I don’t remember what the count was on my first day of seventh grade, but it was pretty close.

My first six years of school were spent in the relative safety of Lake Wilson where our school was about a five-minute dash from home. It was familiar, it was safe.

Junior high on the other hand was rife with pitfalls and dangers around every corner. For a kid of my stature, that often lost wrestling contests with our cats and was owned on most every occasion by a wet shirt, this was like being on Hennepin Avenue after 9 p.m.

Junior high and high school were lawless wastelands fraut with danger lurking down every hallway as if I was walking into the OK Corral with Ike and Bill Clanton waiting but I was no Doc Holiday.

What I was was easy pickings.

My dad was also a teacher in the high school and junior high in those years but name recognition made not a difference in the world. I often had nightmares of locker-shoving, wedgie-receiving and the dreaded swirly-dipping. I never did get a swirly, that dreadful horror of being tipped upside down and having your head dipped in a toilet and flushed so you were left a dripping unicorn. And really, I never heard of anybody getting that, but I did get a pretty good number of wedgies. It doesn’t do much for street cred having to walk through a school day with the waistband of one’s underwear detached, flopping a good inch above your wasteline.

See. Brutal.

I was an easy target but those were in the Dark Ages of school where the halls were lawless and brigands waited to lighten your load of pencils or sprawl the contents of your prized Trapper Keeper all over the floor. There were also the horror stories of sporadic pantsings in public places and Thunderdome-like games of dodgeball that left kids both mentally and physically scarred.

You had to be tough in those days and as a seventh-grader you never, ever wandered alone into the senior hallway. The senior hallway was in the bad part of town or the old part of the school that harkened back to rougher days presented in the 1960s to the 1970s.

Those halls were haunted and patrolled by monstrosities that challenged description and there were hallways that teachers sometimes avoided, and yet you had to walk through these halls just to go to lunch, the deepest chasm of our school where the only entrance was a singularly tight hallway of such aged stone that one could only wildly speculate as to the age.

Perhaps the inquisition as my young mind frantically searched for reasons to be afraid. You see, I’m that way. I don’t find the soothing, I find the scary because I overreact. It’s not so bad these days, though from time to time I have flash backs when walking through Austin High School.

When someone says “hi,” I reflectively flinch, yelling, “not in the face!”

Okay, so I never suffered violence of any kind and no junior high and high school weren’t that bad.

Tuesday I saw none of that. Kids were happy to be there, parents where happy to have them there [you know what I’m talking about parents] and teachers and principals beamed as the kids wandered back into familiar hallways while others entered for the first time.

True, I saw unsure faces as there probably were in every school, even the high school.

Just remember, I still have no idea where I am so don’t ask me where you need to go.