Big Changes

It seems like I went to school about a million years ago at times. Retirement is a mixed bag. I retired early to take care of family. I saw myself eventually going back to work. I now know, it is not going to happen. Besides, all of my references have or are retiring too.

Around 2000, I taught one child whose mother kept making references to playing basketball for Northside High School which was my Alma mater. When I was in high school, participation in any of the athletics made you popular, big time. But I didn't remember her. Such was my fascination with the basketball team.

My sister who was six years younger remembered her. Her memory is that the woman thought very big of herself back then. It is with a little snicker we had a laugh at her expense. Snobbery does not pay. It had been twenty years but membership on the basketball team apparently carried a lot of clout in adulthood.

I later witnessed the same woman having to eat a large piece of humble pie which was quite humbling to me. Braggadocio often masks a lack or a sheer unknowing that we all have feet of clay. I wanted to dislike her, but I couldn't after that. I knew she had been aggravating in school. A co-worker who had taught her maintained she was much older than me. The fact that I had gone on in school before she started did not stop the image. Beauty certainly is reflected in how people treat you.

Pride can make you do disastrous things to maintain appearances. Pretensions come across as being a phony. We buy items we can ill afford to keep up with the Jones.

What got me on this topic was a blog hop looking for what you would write your teenage self.

It was so long ago but the memory still lingers nearby. Moving back to my hometown, I meet former friends and enemies of my schooldays. I ran into one woman where I exercise. My first thought was to avoid her. We were frienemies in school.  Then I thought, that is silly.

Her mother would hold me as an example of how she would like her to be in junior high. Her mother died when she was a teenager. I always understood the hurt she felt from her mother.

I was the sort of kid that adults loved. If they only knew what a pain in the arse I could be to my own set of parents. I held a job, did chores for my parents, made high grades in school. I talked back to my mother at home. My dad would often talk to me about not aggravating my mother so badly.

I approached my former schoolmate, and she pretended not to recognize me at first. She had done some nasty school girl things to me before life moved us in different directions.  I know the laugh I felt inside had to explode from my eyes. Then the relaxation when she knew I came in peace.

Squabbles that occurred 40 years prior materialized in her mind the same way they were in mine. We weren't those teens anymore. If we could remember specifics, we would have had a good laugh.

What would I go back and tell my teenage self is nothing. Some of the worst things in my life have helped me grow as a person. You just can't really know what you haven't experience.

I had someone tell me I was not a good driver because of my complaint that a car with a manual transmission are bad to roll backwards on a hill when you go from a breaking position to moving forward. Several years later, they called me to move a truck they had allowed someone to park in their driveway. They could not drive a manual.

I feel very lucky to become a senior citizen. So many people did not get the opportunity. To say I have had disappointments in life in an understatement. Those experiences have allowed me to know that I have had a lot of good in my life. I would have never understood that paradox as a teenager.