1970 and then some

In a short 5 billion years the sun will become a red giant and swallow up the earth and everyone on it. So don’t take things too seriously…

Only the hairstyles had changed…

It was a different town. The school colors weren’t the same and they borrowed a different tune for the school song, but it could have been the same band, the same choir, the same folding chairs set up on the gym floor as the whole town turns out to say goodbye.

Half a hundred kids from half a hundred families – most of them have been together since kindergarten, born to parents and grandparents who’ve also been together in this little town since kindergarten and before.

“I’m standing where my dad stood,” announced the class salutatorian, triggering approving hoots and applause from a partisan crowd. Past and future in competition with the present.

Litanies of superlatives and accomplishments are recited to nods, cheers, and applause at the appropriate places. Left unmentioned is the truth that for some, this high school glory as the high point of their lives – y’know, the middle-aged guy in the tattered letter jacket retelling old stories at the end of the bar long after anyone is any more interested, the prom queen working graveyard shift at the truckstop…

The program notes three grads have signed up for the military – one to the Navy, two for the Big Green Machine. Some decades ago, it was the Legion color guard – now gray fellows in blued field caps – who went away, destined to come home as if they’d never left.

Nearly all this year’s grads will leave, like members of the class before them and the class before that and so on. There’s small opportunity in this small town. It’s been that way for a while and it’s not likely to change any time soon. Come fall, most will be back in a classroom somewhere – most likely a state school of some sort. Anymore, getting out of high school means getting into a school of another sort, or getting on the very bottom rung of a career ladder that doesn’t go very high no matter how hard you work. A couple of generations ago, this was farm country. Still is, after a fashion. There’s still plenty of farmland but damn few farmers working it. When those farm families left, they took the feed stores, the implement dealers, and pretty much all of Main Street with them. There’s a Dollar General out by the highway and a Kwik Trip at the other end of town, but other than the old folk’s home and a couple dusty bars, there’s not much here but the grade school, the high school, and a couple of churches where folks pray things will get better.

Minneapolis is less than two hours away. Sort of a scary place when you’ve grown up recognizing most every face in the stands at the Friday night football game. But The Cities are where the jobs are, where the money is. If not Minneapolis, then Rochester or maybe Duluth or some other place in some other state you’ve heard about but never been to. One thing’s certain, home’s not where the future is … if you’ve any luck at all.

Fifty-five years ago it was me sitting up there … third row from the front…somewhere between Bubbers and Denstad…wating for my future to arrive.

I best remember Annie Brady leading us in a skin-tight canary yellow sequined mini-dress that, all these years later, still makes me wonder what might have happened if I’d had the nerve to have asked her out (and to ruefully regret that fateful lack of nerve). I’m told I walked out with a shit-eating grin plastered all over my face – one more example of my bad attitude according to the folks who believed the thought of leaving should make me cry.

Looking back, I was ready to leave – in pretty much all the ways a kid could be ready. The school whose rules and restrictions I was glad to leave behind had pretty much taught me what I’d need to know – esoecually how to type and how to drive…those hours spent on algebra have yet to prove their worth. It wasn’t that the town was too small for me, there just wasn’t room for all of us. So most of us left. A few went back. I wasn’t one of them.

But sitting in a different gym, in a different town, on a long distant night I felt a month and a half short of 18 again, knowing only that kindergarten was behind me and that I hadn’t a clue about what was coming at me. I’ve got no Pollyanna words for all the new grads pollywogging their way into adulthood. If you’re not rich, it’s tough, and even if you are, bad stuff’s gonna happen. But there’s plenty of fun to be had. Plenty of things worth doing, people worth knowing, days worth living.

Meanwhile, remember that in a short 5 billion years the sun will become a red giant and swallow up the earth and everyone on it.

So don’t take things too seriously…

Just seriously enough.