Feeling really good right now. Better than I can remember feeling in a long, long time. For those who haven't been keeping up with the saga, it's been a rough turn of events since about mid-2009. Lots of pretty awful stuff.
The worst part was the sensation that the bad stuff just kept coming and coming. It's not like just surviving a short-term event. It was like crappy things happened over the course of month after month after month. Just when I thought I was done with something, I'd get blindsided by it again. It was horrible.
Now, though, I feel like maybe, finally, the waves have subsided. Most of the bad news appears to be, finally and mercifully, behind me. At least for now.
Two things that I have really been neglecting have been my fitness and my music. Those are, coincidentally, two of my favorite things in the world.
It's just that the events of my life were so exhausting that by the time the day ended, all I wanted to do was dissolve into the couch and watch TV. Who knows, I guess I also had this nagging sensation in the back of my head that I wasn't entitled to enjoy those things since I'd made such a mess of the rest of my life.
The insidious thing about that is that, especially with exercise, you end up in a downward spiral.
Exercise makes you healthier, improves your mood and gives you greater endurance. When things are bad and I stopped exercising, all three of those things took a hit just when I needed them most.
Over the course of the past few weeks, I've moved some hand-weights into the condo from the detached garage. I've been doing a few reps of this and that. I just set up my rower and did a 10K row. I'm ready to get physically active again. It's been a long time.
Not sure what goals I'm going to have with this, other than just making myself healthier. We'll see. The trick now is to keep up working out regularly.
My doctor actually prescribed over the counter Omega-3 fish oil for me to take. I think it's going to have a positive impact on my bloodwork, but I also find I'm just not as hungry throughout the day, now, either. If the press is to be believed, this is a good supplement for folks who don't get much fish in their diet. I doubt it could possibly do any harm. And if the press is to be believed, it may do tremendous good.
The other thing is that I get a promotion at work again this year. It comes with a pretty big bump in pay. Things will be easier, financially, after that.
The upcoming promotion (not until August), and a pretty good tax refund also mean I could afford to start rebuilding my guitar collection. I'm actually playing again, and it feels good.
Really, the two things in my life I've ever done that resulted in me just getting lost in things and losing track of time are playing music and writing computer code. The computer code was seldom enjoyable because whether I lost myself in it or not, there were always deadlines to meet. The guitar, though, is something I love to do.
I was going to take a guitar with me down to the hotel in Dayton where I spend my week-days, but the temperatures lately have been around zero. I am afraid it may damage any instrument I might take down. Once my tax return arrives, though, I'm going to buy a little portable keyboard and road-case. I figure that'll handle extremes in temperature better.
Also, my goal was to get my credit rating back into the 700s, and at least according to one service, it is. I'll continue rebuilding. My near-term goal (sometime in the next 3 years) is to get back to where I can get 0% promotional financing on a new car. I just hope my current hoopty can hold out a few more months or years until that happens.
So, I don't know what it is that triggered things, but things got better all in a hurry. During these past few years, things were pretty hard. I was barely holding it together. My main goal throughout was to not-fail my son, and I hope I did a good job of that. Now, though, I have the energy to devote to making myself a better person.
I'm still not entirely sure what the future holds, but I feel like I'm back on track. 2012 was the year everything fell apart. 2013 was the year it took all I could do to stop losing ground. 2014 may be the year I start making strides forward.
So, goals for this year are:
1. To play music every week
2. To try and exercise every day
3. Stay debt-free
4. Keep making progress professionally
Saturday, January 25, 2014
Friday, January 3, 2014
The Word According to The Fresh Prince
Recently, a friend posted a Will Smith quote on Facebook. Honestly, I have no idea if it is actually a Will Smith quote, but the basic gist was, "Sometimes you have to put the past in the past. Take inventory and appreciate what remains. Then, move forward." (Apologies if the paraphrase is off if, indeed, the famous philospher, "fresh prince of bel aire" is offended.)
That got me thinking. I have gotten very, very good at putting the past in the past. Comes from the learning style of "do it wrong so many times, you have no choice but to stumble on the right way." I have to thank my son for that. I spent the first 35 years of my life regretting pretty much everything I had ever done.
Once my son came around, I wouldn't have changed a single thing about my life, because it all led to him. I wouldn't change a thing about him. I know I'm not the only one who feels this way, but the love of a parent for a child is unlike anything else in life. He is perfect to me. He was also a perfect beginning. From the moment he was born, I put the past in the past and kept an eye to the future.
I've also always been very, very good about keeping an eye to the future. I was unhappy with my life for most of it. What has always kept me going is the promise of a better day ahead. People will eventually believe what they need to believe in order to face each day. Some people fill this need with faith in God, or love of their fellow man, or a sense of purpose in their lives. I wish I could say that I was driven primarily by all of those things, but that simply isn't true. My faith is in the future. It always has been. Even during my darkest times as a little child, my grandmother would fill my heart and head with visions of a better tomorrow.
That's a great thing, I think. The people I admire most tend to be those with optimism and a vision of the future. The downside is that focusing too much on the future can keep a person from appreciating the present.
That is where I truly fail. I really need to do a better job of appreciating where I am, instead of focusing solely on where I'm going. I need to be more thankful for the many, many blessings in my life.
This is the future I waited so long for. Not all of it turned out badly. In fact, some of it turned out better than I ever could have imagined.
I truly believe that a person's happiness or sadness in life lies largely with their perception of things. Some situations are truly so great that virtually nobody would be unhappy in them. Some situations are truly so horrible that nobody could possibly be happy in them. But most of life, the vast, vast majority, and the way most of us live our lives, is someplace in-between.
I have a challenging situation with trying to balance my time with my son, and a job that's 150 miles away. I'm fortunate, though, that my job is as accommodating of this challenge as any job could reasonably be. I work with great people. I have a sense of purpose in what I do. Even though it's less money than what I'd become accustomed to, the pay is actually very good. Not great, mind you, but good.
There's an old Chinese proverb (probably apocryphal and invented in Los Angeles, like egg rolls), that a blessing for most people is to wish them "enough". As in, "I wish you enough", versus, say, "I wish you tremendous wealth."
This whole thing could have gone so many other ways. Every time I read the paper about those bizarre near-hermits the Walton family, or hear a tale of somebody murdered by a relative in a plot to steal their riches, or a story of a wealthy family's kids dying of a drug overdose, I'm reminded that sometimes wealth isn't the cure-all that I've always thought it would be. Sure, it solves a host of problems. However, it brings a host of different problems.
At a minimum, I know my friends are not motivated by any ulterior motive. I know my son won't be tempted to live a wasted and pointless life on hoarded wealth. Now, yes, if given the choice, I'd take rich people's problems over struggling people's problems any day. However, it's important to note that you truly are trading one set of problems for another. The other set of problems may be less challenging, but they're still problems.
So, I don't have wealth, but I have a good job. I don't have every moment with my son like I'd like, but I do have quality time with him. I still see pretty much every sporting event he's in. There are plenty of fathers who, due to the demands of their work, are far less involved in their kids' lives than they want to be. It wouldn't take much of a stretch to envision myself in that situation.
All in all, if I had to chose between success, wealth, leisure, all the trappings of a fabulous life, and having a healthy son I could be proud of, I'd pick the healthy son. Every time, no hesitation. Well... that's sort of the deal I got. I sort of lost out on all the parts of my life that amount to tinkering around the edges, and I got the only part that really, truly means the world to me. I'm doing pretty good.
Mostly, I should take a look and realize that I still have a lot of time left in my life. I've got a lot of spins of the globe left in me. There is still so much adventure ahead. I can still dream. 10 years from now, I could be working for the government in some foreign country. Or, I could be back writing applications software in Silicon Valley. 20 years from now, I could be comfortably retired, spending my time with my grandkids.
But again, that's looking to the future. In the mean time, my bills are paid and my heart is full. That's enough.
That got me thinking. I have gotten very, very good at putting the past in the past. Comes from the learning style of "do it wrong so many times, you have no choice but to stumble on the right way." I have to thank my son for that. I spent the first 35 years of my life regretting pretty much everything I had ever done.
Once my son came around, I wouldn't have changed a single thing about my life, because it all led to him. I wouldn't change a thing about him. I know I'm not the only one who feels this way, but the love of a parent for a child is unlike anything else in life. He is perfect to me. He was also a perfect beginning. From the moment he was born, I put the past in the past and kept an eye to the future.
I've also always been very, very good about keeping an eye to the future. I was unhappy with my life for most of it. What has always kept me going is the promise of a better day ahead. People will eventually believe what they need to believe in order to face each day. Some people fill this need with faith in God, or love of their fellow man, or a sense of purpose in their lives. I wish I could say that I was driven primarily by all of those things, but that simply isn't true. My faith is in the future. It always has been. Even during my darkest times as a little child, my grandmother would fill my heart and head with visions of a better tomorrow.
That's a great thing, I think. The people I admire most tend to be those with optimism and a vision of the future. The downside is that focusing too much on the future can keep a person from appreciating the present.
That is where I truly fail. I really need to do a better job of appreciating where I am, instead of focusing solely on where I'm going. I need to be more thankful for the many, many blessings in my life.
This is the future I waited so long for. Not all of it turned out badly. In fact, some of it turned out better than I ever could have imagined.
I truly believe that a person's happiness or sadness in life lies largely with their perception of things. Some situations are truly so great that virtually nobody would be unhappy in them. Some situations are truly so horrible that nobody could possibly be happy in them. But most of life, the vast, vast majority, and the way most of us live our lives, is someplace in-between.
I have a challenging situation with trying to balance my time with my son, and a job that's 150 miles away. I'm fortunate, though, that my job is as accommodating of this challenge as any job could reasonably be. I work with great people. I have a sense of purpose in what I do. Even though it's less money than what I'd become accustomed to, the pay is actually very good. Not great, mind you, but good.
There's an old Chinese proverb (probably apocryphal and invented in Los Angeles, like egg rolls), that a blessing for most people is to wish them "enough". As in, "I wish you enough", versus, say, "I wish you tremendous wealth."
This whole thing could have gone so many other ways. Every time I read the paper about those bizarre near-hermits the Walton family, or hear a tale of somebody murdered by a relative in a plot to steal their riches, or a story of a wealthy family's kids dying of a drug overdose, I'm reminded that sometimes wealth isn't the cure-all that I've always thought it would be. Sure, it solves a host of problems. However, it brings a host of different problems.
At a minimum, I know my friends are not motivated by any ulterior motive. I know my son won't be tempted to live a wasted and pointless life on hoarded wealth. Now, yes, if given the choice, I'd take rich people's problems over struggling people's problems any day. However, it's important to note that you truly are trading one set of problems for another. The other set of problems may be less challenging, but they're still problems.
So, I don't have wealth, but I have a good job. I don't have every moment with my son like I'd like, but I do have quality time with him. I still see pretty much every sporting event he's in. There are plenty of fathers who, due to the demands of their work, are far less involved in their kids' lives than they want to be. It wouldn't take much of a stretch to envision myself in that situation.
All in all, if I had to chose between success, wealth, leisure, all the trappings of a fabulous life, and having a healthy son I could be proud of, I'd pick the healthy son. Every time, no hesitation. Well... that's sort of the deal I got. I sort of lost out on all the parts of my life that amount to tinkering around the edges, and I got the only part that really, truly means the world to me. I'm doing pretty good.
Mostly, I should take a look and realize that I still have a lot of time left in my life. I've got a lot of spins of the globe left in me. There is still so much adventure ahead. I can still dream. 10 years from now, I could be working for the government in some foreign country. Or, I could be back writing applications software in Silicon Valley. 20 years from now, I could be comfortably retired, spending my time with my grandkids.
But again, that's looking to the future. In the mean time, my bills are paid and my heart is full. That's enough.
Wednesday, January 1, 2014
Time
It is amazing how the perception of the passage of time changes in a person's lifetime. I can still remember being a grade-schooler waiting for Christmas day. One week felt like an eternity. As time goes on, it passes more and more quickly.
When you are a kid, your life stretches out in an incomprehensibly long trail before you. Time is everywhere. It is mostly an obstacle. Time stands in the way of what you want. It makes you wait to graduate high school, to graduate college, to get out of the military.
Eventually, though, time becomes precious. You realize that there are more years behind you than ahead. You wish time could slow down. You now know that time isn't the obstacle to the things you want. Time becomes the thing you want.
2014 will be the year my son turns 13 and starts 8th grade, his final year before High School. He's mostly a young man these days. No longer a little boy. Time set that table, and then cleared it away. I know how quickly 2 or 3 or 4 years can pass. Soon, he'll be out of High School and one way or another, independent and making his way in the world. I can help if I want, but so, so soon, my incredible time watching a boy grow into a man will be over. Now that I've seen so many years, I know that each year will continually pass faster and faster.
I actually don't look forward to the day he's grown. I know he'll be a fine man. I hope things work out so that I'll have grandchildren to play with. I hope my life will be such that I can be an active part of their lives. But it will never feel exactly like this again.
So, I remind myself that each thing has its season. You can't stop and linger at the parts you like the most. The best you can do is appreciate things as they come.
A few years ago, I started on a road that I knew was going to be unpleasant for a few years. 2012 was the start of my great depression. A depression emotionally and financially. Life ebbs and flows. I was riding high from 2007 to 2009. But the downstroke was really, really bad. It has lasted a long, long time.
2014 things will start to get better. Barring any unforeseeable calamities, it should be the start of building something great with what's left of my life. I'll be able to buy a nice house and drive nice cars again, eventually. 2015 should be great.
So, in a way, 2014 is like the last of the bad years. Things will be getting better, but only relative to a pretty deep hole. I need to think of this in the same way I thought of my last year before graduating college, or my last year before getting out of the Army. I need to fill it with the optimism that comes with knowing that you did a drawn-out, challenging thing.
Often, those things that seemed so excruciating when you were going through them provide the most pleasant memories later. I do have joy in my life. Mostly around my son.
He's one of the most athletic kids in his grade, despite being one of the youngest. More importantly, I'm proud of the fine young man he is. He has strong, positive character. I worry about him like any parent would, but he has the tools to go far in life. He gives every indication that he'll make good use of his potential.
So, I find myself torn. Torn between wanting 2014 to end quickly, because it represents the last of the dues I need to pay for my most recent setbacks. Also, torn because I just don't have that many years left with my son as a young man before he is, simply, a full grown man.
In the end, things aren't good or bad because I decide they should be. I can alter the way I look at things, but most things are pretty far outside my control. And time doesn't pass quickly or slowly based on my desires. It passes as it passes.
So, while I'm paying the last of my dues (for now) and looking forward to a better 2015, I will try as much as possible, to enjoy the time as it passes.
Now, on more mundane notes:
1. I think next Winter, if I'm in Ohio, I'm going to take the 2 weeks around Christmas off. Logan is off from school, and I may see if there's any way I can work a week in Phoenix in there. That was a fun thing to do last year. It'd be nice to ring in the New Year with my family out there. Plus, lord knows the weather is a really, really welcome break. Not sure if I'll make it a ski vacation or not, but we'll see.
2. I'm not big on New Year's resolutions because, frankly, they're a cliche. You promise you'll do better on a number of things and by February, you discover you're the same person you always were. But I do believe in trying to be better. I do believe that sometimes you just have to commit to making a change. So, my ONE resolution this year is oatmeal. I'm going to keep oatmeal at work and instead of eating McDonald's or bagels from the bagel shop, I'm going to eat oatmeal for breakfast.
3. I won't know for a few months, but I may have the chance to do some job-related travel in 2014. Sort of a complicated topic, but I really, really want to do this. It's hard to think about much else at the moment.
4. As some of you may know, I was accepted to a code bootcamp in San Francisco last year. However, I decided to ride out the government job just a little longer. I still don't know which direction my life will take. I just believe in investing in yourself. Probably always, but now more than ever, your only job security is the investments you make in your skills. Government work is pretty steady and secure, but nothing is a certainty and the applications development job market is pretty crazy in a few parts of the country. If the economy heats up, things could get sorta nutso. When I will go, or even ultimately if I'll go are still up in the air. But I've got that on the back burner.
5. 2015 is the year when I should be able to decisively turn the tide. So, despite the fact that all time is precious, I hope I can be forgiven for looking past 2014 to some degree.
When you are a kid, your life stretches out in an incomprehensibly long trail before you. Time is everywhere. It is mostly an obstacle. Time stands in the way of what you want. It makes you wait to graduate high school, to graduate college, to get out of the military.
Eventually, though, time becomes precious. You realize that there are more years behind you than ahead. You wish time could slow down. You now know that time isn't the obstacle to the things you want. Time becomes the thing you want.
2014 will be the year my son turns 13 and starts 8th grade, his final year before High School. He's mostly a young man these days. No longer a little boy. Time set that table, and then cleared it away. I know how quickly 2 or 3 or 4 years can pass. Soon, he'll be out of High School and one way or another, independent and making his way in the world. I can help if I want, but so, so soon, my incredible time watching a boy grow into a man will be over. Now that I've seen so many years, I know that each year will continually pass faster and faster.
I actually don't look forward to the day he's grown. I know he'll be a fine man. I hope things work out so that I'll have grandchildren to play with. I hope my life will be such that I can be an active part of their lives. But it will never feel exactly like this again.
So, I remind myself that each thing has its season. You can't stop and linger at the parts you like the most. The best you can do is appreciate things as they come.
A few years ago, I started on a road that I knew was going to be unpleasant for a few years. 2012 was the start of my great depression. A depression emotionally and financially. Life ebbs and flows. I was riding high from 2007 to 2009. But the downstroke was really, really bad. It has lasted a long, long time.
2014 things will start to get better. Barring any unforeseeable calamities, it should be the start of building something great with what's left of my life. I'll be able to buy a nice house and drive nice cars again, eventually. 2015 should be great.
So, in a way, 2014 is like the last of the bad years. Things will be getting better, but only relative to a pretty deep hole. I need to think of this in the same way I thought of my last year before graduating college, or my last year before getting out of the Army. I need to fill it with the optimism that comes with knowing that you did a drawn-out, challenging thing.
Often, those things that seemed so excruciating when you were going through them provide the most pleasant memories later. I do have joy in my life. Mostly around my son.
He's one of the most athletic kids in his grade, despite being one of the youngest. More importantly, I'm proud of the fine young man he is. He has strong, positive character. I worry about him like any parent would, but he has the tools to go far in life. He gives every indication that he'll make good use of his potential.
So, I find myself torn. Torn between wanting 2014 to end quickly, because it represents the last of the dues I need to pay for my most recent setbacks. Also, torn because I just don't have that many years left with my son as a young man before he is, simply, a full grown man.
In the end, things aren't good or bad because I decide they should be. I can alter the way I look at things, but most things are pretty far outside my control. And time doesn't pass quickly or slowly based on my desires. It passes as it passes.
So, while I'm paying the last of my dues (for now) and looking forward to a better 2015, I will try as much as possible, to enjoy the time as it passes.
Now, on more mundane notes:
1. I think next Winter, if I'm in Ohio, I'm going to take the 2 weeks around Christmas off. Logan is off from school, and I may see if there's any way I can work a week in Phoenix in there. That was a fun thing to do last year. It'd be nice to ring in the New Year with my family out there. Plus, lord knows the weather is a really, really welcome break. Not sure if I'll make it a ski vacation or not, but we'll see.
2. I'm not big on New Year's resolutions because, frankly, they're a cliche. You promise you'll do better on a number of things and by February, you discover you're the same person you always were. But I do believe in trying to be better. I do believe that sometimes you just have to commit to making a change. So, my ONE resolution this year is oatmeal. I'm going to keep oatmeal at work and instead of eating McDonald's or bagels from the bagel shop, I'm going to eat oatmeal for breakfast.
3. I won't know for a few months, but I may have the chance to do some job-related travel in 2014. Sort of a complicated topic, but I really, really want to do this. It's hard to think about much else at the moment.
4. As some of you may know, I was accepted to a code bootcamp in San Francisco last year. However, I decided to ride out the government job just a little longer. I still don't know which direction my life will take. I just believe in investing in yourself. Probably always, but now more than ever, your only job security is the investments you make in your skills. Government work is pretty steady and secure, but nothing is a certainty and the applications development job market is pretty crazy in a few parts of the country. If the economy heats up, things could get sorta nutso. When I will go, or even ultimately if I'll go are still up in the air. But I've got that on the back burner.
5. 2015 is the year when I should be able to decisively turn the tide. So, despite the fact that all time is precious, I hope I can be forgiven for looking past 2014 to some degree.
Sunday, December 22, 2013
Merry Christmas! End of Year 2013!!!
2013 is coming to an end. My apologies to everybody who won't be getting a Christmas card this year. It sort of snuck up on me and I guess I'm still shaking off mope-mode.
2012 was a terrible year. Just a year where a whole lot of terrible things all happened in rapid succession. 2013, I feel like I've stopped losing ground. Things didn't get good, per se, but at least I wasn't in full retreat all year like I was in 2012.
I did get a few small mercies in 2013. I found a great condo. It isn't my ideal living situation, but it's spacious and feels homey. It's within walking distance of Logan's home games at his Junior High. The job continues to go well. The longer I do it, the more I like it. I was dealing with lingering ill effects of 2012 all year, but I have my fingers crossed that everything should be taken care of from here on out.
I am also grateful for my job, especially in an economy where so many others are struggling. I have friends and I have my son. So, I have some blessings to count.
2014 is still a little early for me to say I'll turn the tide, but it's going to be a year where I get my feet more solidly underneath me.
My brother is moving back to Ohio. It'll be good to have Rob back in the state. He was a lot of fun to chum around with before he moved to California. It'll be good to see a lot more of him.
I am sorta making peace with my current situation. I drive to Dayton for work during the week, then back up here on weekends. I also try to drive up for Logan's sporting events. It's a hassle. I do a lot of driving, but it could be worse. At least I do get quite a few days with my son. It's not as good as if I had an actual job around here, but it is what it is. Toledo has a horrible economy.
There will be some developments at work in 2014. I will rotate out of my current office and I'm looking forward to seeing where I go next. There are a few other opportunities that may pop up, too.
Until then, well, it feels like I'm still treading water, but at least I'm not drowning so much anymore.
I'm hopeful that my December 2014 update has a lot more good news. We'll see. Sometimes you just have to play the game to see how it ends.
There will be some developments at work in 2014. I will rotate out of my current office and I'm looking forward to seeing where I go next. There are a few other opportunities that may pop up, too.
Until then, well, it feels like I'm still treading water, but at least I'm not drowning so much anymore.
I'm hopeful that my December 2014 update has a lot more good news. We'll see. Sometimes you just have to play the game to see how it ends.
Saturday, November 2, 2013
Driving forward through the darkness
As much as I'd like to believe the disasters of 2012 are behind me, there seems to be something every week or two that drags me back into it.
As an example, I got a notice from the State of Michigan that I owed them $225. They said they were going to start tacking on penalties and interest. So, I mailed the check and contacted my payroll servicer who screwed up a tax return to them. They admitted their mistake and sent an amended return.
Now, State of Michigan should refund the overpayment to me. But they'll probably send it in my business name. That means that depositing the check is going to be a hassle. Oh well. I'll figure something out. God only knows what, but I'll figure something out.
Things like that are just depressing. I'm trying to focus on building things back up and it just defeats me to have to get dragged back into the past again. Not once have any of these episodes been because of anything I did wrong. It's always some governmental agency or court screwing up some sort of paperwork or whatnot.
I think if I can just hang on, I can be done with it all sometime before the end of 2014. It won't last forever. So, I persevere.
Logan's football season is over. He tries out for basketball next year. After the fiasco with the Mavericks a few years back, I'm always more nervous than ever at tryout time.
I just want him to have a shot at making his high school teams if he wants to play in high school.
I will breathe a big sigh of relief if he makes his 7th grade team, though. I think his chances are excellent, but it's never a done deal until it's final.
Anyway, I don't feel that great now. Like I said, I'll feel better when 2012 is behind me, but it isn't yet, and might not be for a while. So, I just do what I have to do and keep trying to move forward.
As an example, I got a notice from the State of Michigan that I owed them $225. They said they were going to start tacking on penalties and interest. So, I mailed the check and contacted my payroll servicer who screwed up a tax return to them. They admitted their mistake and sent an amended return.
Now, State of Michigan should refund the overpayment to me. But they'll probably send it in my business name. That means that depositing the check is going to be a hassle. Oh well. I'll figure something out. God only knows what, but I'll figure something out.
Things like that are just depressing. I'm trying to focus on building things back up and it just defeats me to have to get dragged back into the past again. Not once have any of these episodes been because of anything I did wrong. It's always some governmental agency or court screwing up some sort of paperwork or whatnot.
I think if I can just hang on, I can be done with it all sometime before the end of 2014. It won't last forever. So, I persevere.
Logan's football season is over. He tries out for basketball next year. After the fiasco with the Mavericks a few years back, I'm always more nervous than ever at tryout time.
I just want him to have a shot at making his high school teams if he wants to play in high school.
I will breathe a big sigh of relief if he makes his 7th grade team, though. I think his chances are excellent, but it's never a done deal until it's final.
Anyway, I don't feel that great now. Like I said, I'll feel better when 2012 is behind me, but it isn't yet, and might not be for a while. So, I just do what I have to do and keep trying to move forward.
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Reunion Weekend!
Who was she? She was elegant and beautiful: looked at least 20 years younger than our age. That wasn't all that unusual. At least half a dozen of the women at the reunion had defied the laws of human physiology and simply had not aged since the 80s. It was that I had no idea, whatsoever, who she was. Everybody else at the reunion did, but I didn't. She wasn't a spouse of a classmate. She was a Tallmadge High graduate. Her date was a guy who everybody knew. He clearly knew her. She had apparently attended High School with me, based on her Facebook profile. The way she interacted with all the other Facebook friends indicated that, without a doubt, she was part of the class of '83. I had no clue, though.
I recognized about half the folks at the reunion on sight. With half of the rest, I could suss it out after studying their faces for a few seconds. The remainder? It took a glance at the name tag. There were just a few, though, who I honestly didn't have any recollection of at all.
The reunion weekend was something I had looked forward to for thirty years. I had complicated matters by completing my requirements early and graduating with the class of '82. So, for the past thirty years, I've been getting notifications of their reunions, but not from my class. Tallmadge is a small town and back then it didn't have much of a transient population. So, a good number of these folks are people I attended kindergarten and first grade with. I wanted to attend the reunions for class of '83.
It wasn't until Facebook that I was able to get in contact with a critical mass of classmates and was able to get on the mailing list for this reunion. 30 years later. That is a long, long time.
I had some apprehension about attending. For those who have followed my ups and downs, 2012 was a bit of a disaster for me. I got beat on pretty hard by an unfortunate series of events that upended most aspects of my life. 2012 was the year when I sold off what was left of my business, finished my divorce, and had to take a job that largely takes me away from my son. It was, in the vernacular, "a shitty year."
I have felt like a loser for a while, now. Strange, it's just a habit you get into, even when things are on the upswing. So, part of me was a little reluctant to go show my loser self off to all my classmates. If I had made my 20 year reunion, I would have just come off of my Ironman Lake Placid finish and would have been at the height of my corporate career. At the 25 year point, I was a millionaire (at least on paper) and at the helm of the company I had started.
As it stood, I didn't get to see those folks until my 30th reunion, at a time in my life when I was rebuilding. I was going to meet my High School classmates at a time when I was in the process of trying to figure out what I was going to do next with my life. Which means, basically, I hadn't really made any progress in the past 30 years.
If anything, I'd regressed. At least in the 80s, I had hair. (In case I made things sound too bleak for dramatic effect, don't be concerned. I have a great job with the DoD and am doing fine. It's just a huge adjustment from the way things were before the economy tanked.)
I missed a lot of folks who I really wished I could see. Somebody mentioned that some of them will probably never come back to a reunion because they hated high school so much. I hated high school, too, but not because of my classmates.
Really, when I think back on my school years, what strikes me most was not how horrible my classmates were, but how really nice most of them were. I won't paint a Pollyanna picture here. There were some kids who were pretty mean. It's a phase for most folks. I'm sure I did things and said things I should regret, if only the memory weren't mercifully concealed by the fog of adolescence.
It was give and take, too. There are a couple of folks where I sorta flinch at the prospect of meeting. Then, I think about it and realize that I'm basing this phobia on something that happened when we were 12 years old. They've probably grown just like I have.
That's the jungle of middle school, mostly. Lots of hormones and immaturity, combined with adult capability to inflict emotional duress on people if you're of a mind to be careless.
There were kids who were picked on. (A few of them, in particular, were picked on so mercilessly I will probably always carry at least a little guilt for even being in the same school when it was happening.)
So, it wasn't perfect. It had commonality with the school experience everywhere.
That having been said, for the most part folks just sorta did their thing on their way to who they would eventually become, especially once they hit High School. Folks were basically civil. Differences were generally appreciated.
After I graduated, I'd see teen movies where the jocks were mean and stuffed nerdy kids into lockers, etc. I never quite got that. The jocks in my school were always pretty nice. For years, I thought maybe it was because I was a self-imposed nerd. I had been a starter on the Freshman football team before I stopped playing sports and became a guitar nerd. Now, though, I am old enough to know that most of them had no idea who the first-stringers were on the Freshman team. Hell, it's pitiful that I knew. They were nice to me because they were nice people. Beginning and end of story right there.
I hit Facebook to to try and brush up on the 3 or 4 people who I honestly didn't remember from school. I was actually Facebook friends with her. Like most of my Facebook friends, though, we probably connected just because we were part of the same group, not because we had been actual friends. Her name gave me no clue at all. But that was a married name. What about her maiden name? No. Nothing. I vaguely remembered it, but for the life of me, I can't connect it to her face. I would have remembered an attractive female classmate. I thought I knew everybody in my class by name. What about her date, everybody knew him... is there a clue in there somewhere? Who did he date in High School? No clue. I have no idea who this woman is... I can place every other single person at this reunion, but her.
High School was awful for me not because of what High School was, or who the other kids were, but because of who I was. I had a difficult family situation, no money and was one of only a small handful of ethnic minorities at the school. Difficult to fathom today.
I worried that my son might feel isolated being that he's 1/4 Korean heritage. Those fears are poorly founded. Bedroom communities like the one I grew up in are full of Asian people these days. The halfback who runs behind him on his middle school football team is named Chan Jin. It's just not something kids today are bothered with thinking about.
I was also gangly and awkward. Had crazy hair, bad complexion and a nerd's personality. I also thought it was funny to verbally cut people down now and then. It's hard to know, this long after the fact, whether I was just doing the normal amount of schoolyard putdowns or whether I was genuinely mean to folks. For anything I may have ever said that hurt another kid, I am genuinely sorry and carry that regret to this day. I can only pray that I never said anything that truly hurt a person, but the trouble with being careless is that you just can't know.
From a sociological perspective, I had a lot of early indicators of a youth at risk, and I think most of my classmates would be alarmed to know that I walked pretty far down that path before turning my life around in the Army.
When I think back on my time at school, though, it's as though nobody judged me for any of that. There was never a time when I didn't have friends. Folks accepted me as I was. The jocks and cool kids weren't mean in my school. They knew you, would say hello to you and accepted pretty much everybody. It was a place more like college than high school, I think. It was a place where kids had the space to explore and try different things. A place where you may not know how to "be yourself", yet, but everybody seemed to give you the space to make the effort.
It could have been so much worse, and it is so much worse for so many kids. I was lucky.
In teen movies, the typical arc of the story involves a sensationally beautiful girl who wears glasses and a ponytail. Eventually, she takes off the glasses, gets big hair and then everybody is stunned at the transformation. It is, along with Superman's glasses, the stupidest plot device in the history of drama. Cute girls in high school don't fly under the radar just because they wear glasses. That's not real life. That's not how it happens.
The first night of the reunion was an informal get together at a sports bar. I connected to good friends I had been close to in middle school. Hung out with others who reminded me of how close we had been as friends in the 3rd grade. That is half the beauty of these reunions to me: these people literally knew you when you were a child. When you think of them, you think of things like the time they blew milk out of their nose while laughing in the 2nd grade.
Another grade school friend said he felt bad for poking me in the face with a pencil in the 1st grade. Trouble was, he didn't do it. I slipped and fell on a pencil I was carrying and poked myself in the face. It was gruesome: went all the way through my cheek. Lots of blood and I ended up going to the hospital.
I can only imagine that since we were friends and he was only six, that he felt bad that I'd had that accident. I also imagine that our teacher came in and yelled at the class because we'd been roughhousing during an indoor recess. So, over the years, his memory had played tricks on him and convinced him that he had done it.
I hope he didn't lose any sleep over that one. I straightened the story out so he can at least rest easy from now on.
Some guys from the basketball team were at a table and honestly, they looked like they could take the court today. They were all fit, tall and didn't look that much different, other than the random gray hair here or there. If there's a Gus Macker 30-year reunion category, these guys would clean house.
It took me a while to realize that nobody here thought I was a loser. I was able to relax almost immediately. Nobody was wondering how the hell you go from a seven-figure net worth to zero in 3 years. Nobody thought that only an idiot marries a supermodel-gorgeous woman and divorces her twelve years later. Nobody was questioning what sort of dad has to take a job that takes him away from his son most weeks.
Just like when I was in high school, my anxieties were based on things inside myself. These people were just happy to see me. These were the people I grew up with. The folks I rode the bus with. Now, as then, we're all in our own lives.
Tallmadge was not, by and large, a place where you judged other people for what they were doing or not-doing. The middle class was different in the 1970s. Unions were still strong. Your neighbor could have been anything from a rubber worker at Goodyear to an office worker at Goodyear. Okay, some of them worked for Firestone and BF Goodrich. Seriously, though, the middle class was more diverse, then. Your neighbor could have been a plumber or a professor at a university. So, there was more of a sense of respect for every family and their contribution to society and the community. Not everybody's parents went to college.
You didn't have to be a millionaire: it was enough to simply be a decent person. It was a place with industrial midwestern sensibilities where you worked on your own life and if you were lucky, you got to take joy in the lives of others.
I hadn't seen most of these people in 30 years and all it took was a few minutes with them and our friendships took off right from where we'd left off. I didn't have to be a millionaire for these folks to accept me. It was enough that we were friends when we were kids.
That maiden name. It looks familiar. There was that girl... no... no way...
It was 1977. The most anxiety-producing part of gym class in Junior High, other than our first communal showers, was square dancing. I can only figure that somebody, while designing the curriculum, thought this was a good way to introduce social skills to boys and girls in a form of dancing that's as far from twerking (though that didn't exist at the time) as it could possibly be.
For those not-familiar, square dancing is country and western dancing where 4 couples dance while standing in proximity (sort of like the 4 corners of a square) and a person yells directions to them. The thing is, they yell these directions while also telling you to do these things to the left or the right. So, for instance, "left allemand your partner", or "dosey-do to the right."
This was a problem for me on so many levels. The first and most obvious was that I didn't know my right from my left. I knew they existed as concepts. If I thought about it long enough, I could figure out which was which, but there is a psychological disorder where people can't tell their right from their left. I have it. So does my aunt. I've heard that children who have this disorder never crawled as babies, they sat up and scooted around on their butts. So, it's a real thing and it was a real problem for me in the seventh grade.
That, though, was the least of my worries. The worst part was that boys and girls were left to their own devices to chose a square dancing partner. Oh. My. God.
I was a pimply, gangly, awkward, nerdy, Asian kid wearing garage sale clothing who, since the school wasn't air-conditioned, probably actually smelled bad. This was going to be difficult.
I can't speak to women today, but in the seventh grade? If they had offered the option of taking a beating, instead, I would have chosen the beating. This was required, though and we were actually graded on it. So... I mustered up my courage and approached a girl I'd known since grade school, who was actually sort of a family friend. Had a brief exchange and got the vibe that she'd rather chew glass than to be put into a situation where she would have to physically touch me, then slinked off before the exchange could get any more humiliating.
The couples were pairing off quickly. Seventh grade had combined a few grade-schools, so I didn't know half the people in my seventh grade class when school started. Over across the room I saw a cute little girl standing by herself. She was pretty. Hair pulled back. Face partially concealed by the gigantic glasses that were popular at the time.
"Do you wanna square dance?"
The response took less than a second, but I am certain that Einstein is right about the relativity of time because I think I aged 3 years during that second.
"Okay."
Thank. You. Jesus.
Trouble is, I wasn't out of the woods. Remember that old left-right thing? Yeah. That didn't go away.
You can see the end of this story almost before it begins. I faked my way through much of the dancing, but at a critical time, he told me to go left, I went right. She was a tiny girl, wearing the glasses that were fashionable at the time, which means that her glasses were probably the physcially largest thing about her at the moment. And... *smack* right into her glasses which made an alarming crunching sound.
Oh my god, the kindest girl in the 7th grade and I just broke her glasses by smashing them into her face. Even after this unintentional physical assault that resulted in destroying... I dunno... her means of seeing... she was gracious and kind and completed the next few days of the square dancing segment of PE without demanding a different, less-destructive dance partner.
The last name is the same, but is that her? Is it? No. It can't be. But the more I thought about it, yes, it was. It was the same girl, minus the pony tail and glasses. And as a woman, she's probably hiding her absolutely beautiful freckles behind a flawless base-coat of makeup.
It is her. Mystery solved. I guess the movie makers really were right. There were stunningly beautiful women in my school disgused with glasses and pony tails. Thing is, they don't look better without the glasses and pony tail. They just look different. They were beautiful then, too. And in more than a few cases, they were beautiful inside as well.
The thing that's remarkable about the square dance story is not that it was a special moment. It really wasn't. In fact, I'd pretty much forgotten all about it until I was desperately trying to comb my memories for what I could connect to this classmate's maiden name.
What's remarkable is that when I think back on my school days, they were filled with thousands of small kindnesses that happened all the time. The kid who unexpectedly stood up for you, or the kid who took the time to pay you a compliment. The kid who was the big man on campus, but who didn't consider themselves too good to talk to the nerds and geeks. The girls who could have been cruel, but weren't. The kids who took you seriously at a point in your life when no sane person should have taken you seriously.
I was lucky to go to school when I did, with the people I did. I'm so glad we're back in touch after so many years. We basically grew up together.
Included in all the horrible things that happened in 2012, my grandmother, who raised me, passed away at the age of 94. (Yeah, 2012 was like that for me.)
I tried to visit her regularly when she was alive. So, in a way, it's good to reconnect with my classmates. I hope to get back to Tallmadge to see them a little more often than once every 3 decades from here on out. Reconnecting will give me more reasons to go home now and then.
Because, hey, it's good to stay in touch with the folks who knew you when you were nothing more than potential and dreams.
I recognized about half the folks at the reunion on sight. With half of the rest, I could suss it out after studying their faces for a few seconds. The remainder? It took a glance at the name tag. There were just a few, though, who I honestly didn't have any recollection of at all.
The reunion weekend was something I had looked forward to for thirty years. I had complicated matters by completing my requirements early and graduating with the class of '82. So, for the past thirty years, I've been getting notifications of their reunions, but not from my class. Tallmadge is a small town and back then it didn't have much of a transient population. So, a good number of these folks are people I attended kindergarten and first grade with. I wanted to attend the reunions for class of '83.
It wasn't until Facebook that I was able to get in contact with a critical mass of classmates and was able to get on the mailing list for this reunion. 30 years later. That is a long, long time.
I had some apprehension about attending. For those who have followed my ups and downs, 2012 was a bit of a disaster for me. I got beat on pretty hard by an unfortunate series of events that upended most aspects of my life. 2012 was the year when I sold off what was left of my business, finished my divorce, and had to take a job that largely takes me away from my son. It was, in the vernacular, "a shitty year."
I have felt like a loser for a while, now. Strange, it's just a habit you get into, even when things are on the upswing. So, part of me was a little reluctant to go show my loser self off to all my classmates. If I had made my 20 year reunion, I would have just come off of my Ironman Lake Placid finish and would have been at the height of my corporate career. At the 25 year point, I was a millionaire (at least on paper) and at the helm of the company I had started.
As it stood, I didn't get to see those folks until my 30th reunion, at a time in my life when I was rebuilding. I was going to meet my High School classmates at a time when I was in the process of trying to figure out what I was going to do next with my life. Which means, basically, I hadn't really made any progress in the past 30 years.
If anything, I'd regressed. At least in the 80s, I had hair. (In case I made things sound too bleak for dramatic effect, don't be concerned. I have a great job with the DoD and am doing fine. It's just a huge adjustment from the way things were before the economy tanked.)
I missed a lot of folks who I really wished I could see. Somebody mentioned that some of them will probably never come back to a reunion because they hated high school so much. I hated high school, too, but not because of my classmates.
Really, when I think back on my school years, what strikes me most was not how horrible my classmates were, but how really nice most of them were. I won't paint a Pollyanna picture here. There were some kids who were pretty mean. It's a phase for most folks. I'm sure I did things and said things I should regret, if only the memory weren't mercifully concealed by the fog of adolescence.
It was give and take, too. There are a couple of folks where I sorta flinch at the prospect of meeting. Then, I think about it and realize that I'm basing this phobia on something that happened when we were 12 years old. They've probably grown just like I have.
That's the jungle of middle school, mostly. Lots of hormones and immaturity, combined with adult capability to inflict emotional duress on people if you're of a mind to be careless.
There were kids who were picked on. (A few of them, in particular, were picked on so mercilessly I will probably always carry at least a little guilt for even being in the same school when it was happening.)
So, it wasn't perfect. It had commonality with the school experience everywhere.
That having been said, for the most part folks just sorta did their thing on their way to who they would eventually become, especially once they hit High School. Folks were basically civil. Differences were generally appreciated.
After I graduated, I'd see teen movies where the jocks were mean and stuffed nerdy kids into lockers, etc. I never quite got that. The jocks in my school were always pretty nice. For years, I thought maybe it was because I was a self-imposed nerd. I had been a starter on the Freshman football team before I stopped playing sports and became a guitar nerd. Now, though, I am old enough to know that most of them had no idea who the first-stringers were on the Freshman team. Hell, it's pitiful that I knew. They were nice to me because they were nice people. Beginning and end of story right there.
I hit Facebook to to try and brush up on the 3 or 4 people who I honestly didn't remember from school. I was actually Facebook friends with her. Like most of my Facebook friends, though, we probably connected just because we were part of the same group, not because we had been actual friends. Her name gave me no clue at all. But that was a married name. What about her maiden name? No. Nothing. I vaguely remembered it, but for the life of me, I can't connect it to her face. I would have remembered an attractive female classmate. I thought I knew everybody in my class by name. What about her date, everybody knew him... is there a clue in there somewhere? Who did he date in High School? No clue. I have no idea who this woman is... I can place every other single person at this reunion, but her.
High School was awful for me not because of what High School was, or who the other kids were, but because of who I was. I had a difficult family situation, no money and was one of only a small handful of ethnic minorities at the school. Difficult to fathom today.
I worried that my son might feel isolated being that he's 1/4 Korean heritage. Those fears are poorly founded. Bedroom communities like the one I grew up in are full of Asian people these days. The halfback who runs behind him on his middle school football team is named Chan Jin. It's just not something kids today are bothered with thinking about.
I was also gangly and awkward. Had crazy hair, bad complexion and a nerd's personality. I also thought it was funny to verbally cut people down now and then. It's hard to know, this long after the fact, whether I was just doing the normal amount of schoolyard putdowns or whether I was genuinely mean to folks. For anything I may have ever said that hurt another kid, I am genuinely sorry and carry that regret to this day. I can only pray that I never said anything that truly hurt a person, but the trouble with being careless is that you just can't know.
From a sociological perspective, I had a lot of early indicators of a youth at risk, and I think most of my classmates would be alarmed to know that I walked pretty far down that path before turning my life around in the Army.
When I think back on my time at school, though, it's as though nobody judged me for any of that. There was never a time when I didn't have friends. Folks accepted me as I was. The jocks and cool kids weren't mean in my school. They knew you, would say hello to you and accepted pretty much everybody. It was a place more like college than high school, I think. It was a place where kids had the space to explore and try different things. A place where you may not know how to "be yourself", yet, but everybody seemed to give you the space to make the effort.
It could have been so much worse, and it is so much worse for so many kids. I was lucky.
In teen movies, the typical arc of the story involves a sensationally beautiful girl who wears glasses and a ponytail. Eventually, she takes off the glasses, gets big hair and then everybody is stunned at the transformation. It is, along with Superman's glasses, the stupidest plot device in the history of drama. Cute girls in high school don't fly under the radar just because they wear glasses. That's not real life. That's not how it happens.
The first night of the reunion was an informal get together at a sports bar. I connected to good friends I had been close to in middle school. Hung out with others who reminded me of how close we had been as friends in the 3rd grade. That is half the beauty of these reunions to me: these people literally knew you when you were a child. When you think of them, you think of things like the time they blew milk out of their nose while laughing in the 2nd grade.
Another grade school friend said he felt bad for poking me in the face with a pencil in the 1st grade. Trouble was, he didn't do it. I slipped and fell on a pencil I was carrying and poked myself in the face. It was gruesome: went all the way through my cheek. Lots of blood and I ended up going to the hospital.
I can only imagine that since we were friends and he was only six, that he felt bad that I'd had that accident. I also imagine that our teacher came in and yelled at the class because we'd been roughhousing during an indoor recess. So, over the years, his memory had played tricks on him and convinced him that he had done it.
I hope he didn't lose any sleep over that one. I straightened the story out so he can at least rest easy from now on.
Some guys from the basketball team were at a table and honestly, they looked like they could take the court today. They were all fit, tall and didn't look that much different, other than the random gray hair here or there. If there's a Gus Macker 30-year reunion category, these guys would clean house.
It took me a while to realize that nobody here thought I was a loser. I was able to relax almost immediately. Nobody was wondering how the hell you go from a seven-figure net worth to zero in 3 years. Nobody thought that only an idiot marries a supermodel-gorgeous woman and divorces her twelve years later. Nobody was questioning what sort of dad has to take a job that takes him away from his son most weeks.
Just like when I was in high school, my anxieties were based on things inside myself. These people were just happy to see me. These were the people I grew up with. The folks I rode the bus with. Now, as then, we're all in our own lives.
Tallmadge was not, by and large, a place where you judged other people for what they were doing or not-doing. The middle class was different in the 1970s. Unions were still strong. Your neighbor could have been anything from a rubber worker at Goodyear to an office worker at Goodyear. Okay, some of them worked for Firestone and BF Goodrich. Seriously, though, the middle class was more diverse, then. Your neighbor could have been a plumber or a professor at a university. So, there was more of a sense of respect for every family and their contribution to society and the community. Not everybody's parents went to college.
You didn't have to be a millionaire: it was enough to simply be a decent person. It was a place with industrial midwestern sensibilities where you worked on your own life and if you were lucky, you got to take joy in the lives of others.
I hadn't seen most of these people in 30 years and all it took was a few minutes with them and our friendships took off right from where we'd left off. I didn't have to be a millionaire for these folks to accept me. It was enough that we were friends when we were kids.
That maiden name. It looks familiar. There was that girl... no... no way...
It was 1977. The most anxiety-producing part of gym class in Junior High, other than our first communal showers, was square dancing. I can only figure that somebody, while designing the curriculum, thought this was a good way to introduce social skills to boys and girls in a form of dancing that's as far from twerking (though that didn't exist at the time) as it could possibly be.
For those not-familiar, square dancing is country and western dancing where 4 couples dance while standing in proximity (sort of like the 4 corners of a square) and a person yells directions to them. The thing is, they yell these directions while also telling you to do these things to the left or the right. So, for instance, "left allemand your partner", or "dosey-do to the right."
This was a problem for me on so many levels. The first and most obvious was that I didn't know my right from my left. I knew they existed as concepts. If I thought about it long enough, I could figure out which was which, but there is a psychological disorder where people can't tell their right from their left. I have it. So does my aunt. I've heard that children who have this disorder never crawled as babies, they sat up and scooted around on their butts. So, it's a real thing and it was a real problem for me in the seventh grade.
That, though, was the least of my worries. The worst part was that boys and girls were left to their own devices to chose a square dancing partner. Oh. My. God.
I was a pimply, gangly, awkward, nerdy, Asian kid wearing garage sale clothing who, since the school wasn't air-conditioned, probably actually smelled bad. This was going to be difficult.
I can't speak to women today, but in the seventh grade? If they had offered the option of taking a beating, instead, I would have chosen the beating. This was required, though and we were actually graded on it. So... I mustered up my courage and approached a girl I'd known since grade school, who was actually sort of a family friend. Had a brief exchange and got the vibe that she'd rather chew glass than to be put into a situation where she would have to physically touch me, then slinked off before the exchange could get any more humiliating.
The couples were pairing off quickly. Seventh grade had combined a few grade-schools, so I didn't know half the people in my seventh grade class when school started. Over across the room I saw a cute little girl standing by herself. She was pretty. Hair pulled back. Face partially concealed by the gigantic glasses that were popular at the time.
"Do you wanna square dance?"
The response took less than a second, but I am certain that Einstein is right about the relativity of time because I think I aged 3 years during that second.
"Okay."
Thank. You. Jesus.
Trouble is, I wasn't out of the woods. Remember that old left-right thing? Yeah. That didn't go away.
You can see the end of this story almost before it begins. I faked my way through much of the dancing, but at a critical time, he told me to go left, I went right. She was a tiny girl, wearing the glasses that were fashionable at the time, which means that her glasses were probably the physcially largest thing about her at the moment. And... *smack* right into her glasses which made an alarming crunching sound.
Oh my god, the kindest girl in the 7th grade and I just broke her glasses by smashing them into her face. Even after this unintentional physical assault that resulted in destroying... I dunno... her means of seeing... she was gracious and kind and completed the next few days of the square dancing segment of PE without demanding a different, less-destructive dance partner.
The last name is the same, but is that her? Is it? No. It can't be. But the more I thought about it, yes, it was. It was the same girl, minus the pony tail and glasses. And as a woman, she's probably hiding her absolutely beautiful freckles behind a flawless base-coat of makeup.
It is her. Mystery solved. I guess the movie makers really were right. There were stunningly beautiful women in my school disgused with glasses and pony tails. Thing is, they don't look better without the glasses and pony tail. They just look different. They were beautiful then, too. And in more than a few cases, they were beautiful inside as well.
The thing that's remarkable about the square dance story is not that it was a special moment. It really wasn't. In fact, I'd pretty much forgotten all about it until I was desperately trying to comb my memories for what I could connect to this classmate's maiden name.
What's remarkable is that when I think back on my school days, they were filled with thousands of small kindnesses that happened all the time. The kid who unexpectedly stood up for you, or the kid who took the time to pay you a compliment. The kid who was the big man on campus, but who didn't consider themselves too good to talk to the nerds and geeks. The girls who could have been cruel, but weren't. The kids who took you seriously at a point in your life when no sane person should have taken you seriously.
I was lucky to go to school when I did, with the people I did. I'm so glad we're back in touch after so many years. We basically grew up together.
Included in all the horrible things that happened in 2012, my grandmother, who raised me, passed away at the age of 94. (Yeah, 2012 was like that for me.)
I tried to visit her regularly when she was alive. So, in a way, it's good to reconnect with my classmates. I hope to get back to Tallmadge to see them a little more often than once every 3 decades from here on out. Reconnecting will give me more reasons to go home now and then.
Because, hey, it's good to stay in touch with the folks who knew you when you were nothing more than potential and dreams.
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
Turning of the Seasons
I drove to work on Monday in the dark. First time this year. The days are already getting shorter. The first day of Fall is still more than a month away, but it feels like I'm putting away this year's Summer, now.
Logan starts school in a couple of days. His first football game is next week. In the seasons of sports and school, the Summer is essentially over. He's starting the seventh grade, now. He plays football for his school and will try out for the basketball team sometime November.
I feel like I'm really missing out on parts of his life. Like a good many fathers and sons, sports always connected us. It was where we spent our quality time together. It was where I taught him to catch, hit, throw and shoot. It was where he taught me to be patient with him because he was always trying his best.
Life is slowly but surely getting better but being away from him is the worst. I've seen the worst of the trials of last year. Things are on a slow uphill climb to "better". I'm on much more solid ground.
I still wish my life were different in a big way. I wish I wasn't in a hotel 3 hours away. I wish I could watch every practice. I wish I could be there for every game. I'm afraid that despite my best efforts, I may not be able to.
So, that's what keeps me from feeling really good about the way my life is at the moment. What will I ever be able to do about it? Hard to know at this point. So, I just put one foot in front of the other and keep trying to make progress.
Sometimes, you just cowboy up and do the best you can do.
Logan starts school in a couple of days. His first football game is next week. In the seasons of sports and school, the Summer is essentially over. He's starting the seventh grade, now. He plays football for his school and will try out for the basketball team sometime November.
I feel like I'm really missing out on parts of his life. Like a good many fathers and sons, sports always connected us. It was where we spent our quality time together. It was where I taught him to catch, hit, throw and shoot. It was where he taught me to be patient with him because he was always trying his best.
Life is slowly but surely getting better but being away from him is the worst. I've seen the worst of the trials of last year. Things are on a slow uphill climb to "better". I'm on much more solid ground.
I still wish my life were different in a big way. I wish I wasn't in a hotel 3 hours away. I wish I could watch every practice. I wish I could be there for every game. I'm afraid that despite my best efforts, I may not be able to.
So, that's what keeps me from feeling really good about the way my life is at the moment. What will I ever be able to do about it? Hard to know at this point. So, I just put one foot in front of the other and keep trying to make progress.
Sometimes, you just cowboy up and do the best you can do.
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