The Pomp and Circumstance Is Over

The pomp and circumstance is over, the ensuing party complete. My son has graduated high school! The last half of the year was a battle, not because the classes were hard, but just getting him to get up and go to school was difficult. Somehow, even though he had zero motivation to be there and he put in as little effort as possible, he managed to graduate Magna Cum Laude. Much to the horror of his guidance counselor at school, he has no plans to go to a conventional four year college. I find this quite refreshing and courageous.

There is a sort of unwritten rule these days that you MUST go to college, especially if you’re considered smart in school. Kids are told from the time they hit middle school that you have to go to college if you want to make a decent living and not end up flipping burgers your whole adult life (no offense intended toward any burger flippers out there). There seems to be no choice; you go to college and you’ll get a great job, or you don’t go to college and you’ll be a loser. Granted, you have a better chance of getting a higher paying job with a college education, but as adults with a brain of our own we know this is not an absolute truth. We all know people who went to college and barely scrape by, and we all know people who never went to college or dropped out and are fairly wealthy. Besides, it’s not all about how much money you make, but about how much you like what you do. That seems to be missing in the discussion today.

When I was a senior in high school, I wanted to take a year off and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. It’s not that I didn’t want to go to college, I just didn’t have the money to go where I wanted, as my parents had told me in my senior year that they couldn’t give me any money for college. I also wasn’t sure what I wanted to go for. Well, actually, I did know what I wanted to go to college for, but it wasn’t what my parents, some of my family and friends, most of my teachers and my guidance counselor thought I should be doing. I wanted to be a writer, preferably a sports writer. I thought that would be a great career choice since I loved writing and I loved sports. Plus, I figured if I ever got married, I’d still have to go to the games (Sorry you don’t like me going to the Bruins game, dear, but I have to go. It’s my job!).

I was constantly being told I was too smart to be a writer, that I should be an engineer or an architect because I was very good in math, or I should go into accounting or finance. My thought was that I didn’t want to do any of those things, but I felt pressure from all sides to do something like that. I was also one of those kids that did what my parents told me to do – well, sometimes, but I didn’t like to go against them. I thought if I took a year off, maybe my parents would forget about what they thought I should do and just let me go for what I wanted to do. However, we all somehow came up with the money to pay for my first semester’s tuition and I never took the time to truly explore what I wanted to do.

Fast forward 35 years and here I am doing a job I like but don’t love, and thinking about writing most of the time. And I’ve felt like this for a number of years. So when my kids were small, I swore I wouldn’t push them to do something I wanted them to do or thought they’d be good at, and I would let them choose their career and be what they wanted to be (within reason, of course, I wouldn’t let them be an axe murderer or a drug dealer). So when my daughter told us that she wanted to take some time to figure out what she wanted to do after 3 semesters of college, we totally supported her decision. When she decided to go back to school after a year, we totally supported that decision, too. She’s going for what she wants to do, not what we told her to do. Now my son wants to pursue a career in the music field and I’m totally for it. He may be a musician or a producer – it’s what he wants to do and has a passion for.

I’m proud of both my kids as they make the transition to full-on adulthood. They’re exploring what they want to do with their lives and not letting the masses make them conform to some artificial norm. I wish I had had that kind of strength and courage when I was their age. Who knows, maybe I’d actually love what I do and you’d be reading my book instead of my blog!

Broken Dreams

I’ve recently been watching the “When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions” TV series that was originally on Discovery Channel. The series goes through NASA’s quest to put a man into space and ultimately to get a man to the moon after President Kennedy’s 1961 speech in which he said that the United States should land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. When I was a mere eight years old, I was allowed to stay up late that July night to watch Neil Armstrong be the first man to walk on the moon. Luckily for all of us, it was summer so Mom let us watch history being made.

Many moments of the different missions stand out to me, but one thing that really touched me was when the Apollo 13 Commander, Jim Lovell, spoke about the moment he realized that his dream of walking on the moon was never going to happen. Even though he had been looking forward to being one of the few men to actually walk on the moon for years, he had to let that dream go. He was disappointed but couldn’t dwell on it because he had to focus on getting back home alive.

I never had to make a decision between living and following a dream in my life, but I have had to let some dreams go over the years. After all the hoopla over the moon landings, there was a time I wanted to be an astronaut. My first watch was even a glow-in-the-dark astronaut watch, where the second hand was an astronaut floating around in space, similar to the one below:

How cool is that? However, I realized I could never be an astronaut because just spinning around in circles in my front yard practically made me sick. I mean, if doing the washing machine spin cycle in the front yard makes me puke, I don’t think I’m going to make it into space.

When I was younger, I thought it would be cool to be an actor. Then in fifth grade I decided to be part of a play and I had two small parts. One was the narrator at the beginning of the first and second scenes, and the other was a small part where I was on stage in a group where I didn’t have any lines. The narration part was easy, I just came out and said the name of the play, who it was written by and set the first scene. We did it in front of the younger grades for practice, so I came out, gave the name of the play and who wrote it and then started setting the scene and…went blank. I stood there, repeating “The setting is…” multiple times, while the little kids started laughing. From off to the side, my teacher gave me my line and I finished with a very red face. I realized then that if I couldn’t recite a few lines in front of a few little kids, I could never get up in front of a large group of people and deliver a bunch of lines.

I used to love to sing, too. I was in the Glee Club (yes, it really was called that) and really liked it. Then my voice started changing and I got really self-conscious about how I sounded and that was the end of my singing career. It was over before it even started. Remember Peter Brady when his voice was changing? I could relate. There was also the whole thing about getting up in front of a group of people and performing…with all of them looking at me.

Being on the small side, I used to dream about being tall when I got older – especially if I ended up being taller than all my brothers. When I was in about 6^th grade and was starting to get better in baseball, I imagined myself being like 6’4”. When I was in 9^th grade and most of my friends were growing way more than I was, I imagined myself being 6 feet tall. By the time I was finishing high school, I would have been happy to be 5’9.  Seeing as both my parents were short, 4’11” and 5’5”, I never really had a chance to make 6 feet tall.

Even though I wasn’t very tall, I dreamed of being a professional baseball player from the time I first put on a baseball glove. Up through 10^th grade, I truly believed I had a chance to make it to the major leagues. Then I started thinking about how I was one kid, in one small town, in one small state, and I realized I was pretty good, but not that good. That was probably the only dream that hurt to let go of. 

Not all my dreams were crushed. I have an incredible wife, two awesome kids, a good job and I live a decent life. Those are all dreams that came true. Oh yeah, I may not be writing books, but I am a writer with this blog! And I didn’t even have to choose between a dream and life.