A very long time ago, I prepared to graduate from 8th grade in parochial school, completing several years of a fairly regimented, religious, curriculum commandeered by the nuns who led the educational charge. Breaking from their rather rigid traditions, the nunnery agreed to have both the graduating classes have a yearbook, of sorts. Mind you, this was not a combined effort, no no, the boy and girl classes were kept separate for the educational duration, each on opposite sides of the school building. The exception was kindergarten, where a mixing of the genders was allowed.
In any event, below my photograph in the small yearbook, was kind of a generic notation, Bound to be a Writer, while the other 49 students in the class (yes, 49!) all had these cutesy little comments under their pictures. It didn’t matter much, I was soon to leave for parochial high school and the future looked bright ahead. Or so I thought but, that’s a long story for another day.
For some reason, the thought of being a writer always stayed with me but I never really understood if it was just something randomly tossed out by Ms. Perfect who was the class favorite and in charge of the yearbook. Did she actually see me in a specialized light and feel that I had some future potential? Part of me felt that being a writer would be daring while my initial desires and ambitions for the future were completely apart of sitting behind a typewriter, pencil stuck against my ear and a big yellow lined pad of paper with notes which I felt important to share at some point.
I did end up behind a typewriter, in an office, where I engaged in day-to-day repetitive tasks in a confined, windowless, atmosphere. Looking back, I kept wondering if being in this environment was my future or did I dare get the hell outta that place while time was still on my side. I honestly felt that the 1965 hit song by The Animals was written just for me.
All of these uncertainties and fears found their way to pages in a bunch of black and white notebooks kept under my bed. Much like keeping a diary, I wrote in them constantly and there was usually a closing sentence from me to me advising to get out and find something else, written pleas to move forward to anywhere but where I was. By putting my pen to paper, I was definitely following through with being a writer of sorts even though I allowed life to misdirect me along the way. Somehow, I came to realize that, with each waking day, there were more chances for stories to be told.
Growing up, I quickly learned that things in life were either funny or tragic but realized they are almost always both. We can all find the sad in things that are funny, most jokes are based on what’s broken, the old, the fat, the clueless, the outsider, the desperate, the bad. It is so much harder to find the funny in what is sad and my writing patterns have, at times, managed to unearth it. Once life was easy to laugh at, even at its worst, now, it’s damn hard. And it goes way deeper than just politics.
There was a time, way back before 9/11/01 where people seemed willing to consider innocence before guilt. Not anymore. Quick judgements flood down like a rainstorm and guilt steps in before innocence has a chance and, if it is contemplated, it’s often accompanied by regret for actions already taken in the name of guilt. We all know the script, from Muslims in 2001 onto to Asians when Covid made its appearance and now it’s Jews, because of Gaza. Let’s face it people, being Muslim was not what made those men bombers any more than being Chinese causing the pandemic or being Jewish causing the Gazan tragedy. It just does not matter. Generalized hatred has become habitual and now it is has turned into an epidemic of easy.
Think about how it was once the fringes of society who looked toward hate for relief from their own misery and powerlessness. The underclass needing an underdog. Today, it seems that everyone feels entitled to behave badly even what they are looking at…is in a mirror. It’s difficult, almost impossible, to imagine a ceasefire emerging from the trenches of hate that flank today’s no mans’s land of despair and discord.
God’s good grace might go a long way in making us what we once were and long to be again. There was a time I would have kept these thoughts locked away in a stack of marble notebooks, now I feel we need to accept the sobering reality of life at present. My own reality is that someone saw my potential, sixty-seven years ago. My predicted yearbook path to writing has come to fruition, in some small way.
