I would like to add a category: "Best Human Beings Ever To Step Foot In Cobb County". The winners would be my graduating class of 1977 at Wheeler High School.
It has been almost 40 years since I've graduated high school. Back in 1977, if you asked me what my life would be like in 2015, I probably would have said I would have a jet pack and be not nearly as sexy.
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| What 1977 Me Thought 2015 Me Would Look Like |
Well, here it is 2015 and if you have an elastic definition of the word "sexy", I'm doing pretty good. However, still no jet pack.
My class was unique. It was really the first graduating class of the great migration. The migration of Northerners to Cobb County. I have always felt a lot of sympathy for those folks.
As I have mentioned before, I will always remember seeing a "new" girl being introduced to the class. Her name ended in a vowel. She was from Massachusetts and she spoke an entirely different language than we did. It was a form of English-an English that ignored the letter "r".
Oh, there were others. People who came from Minnesota, Indiana, Illinois, and we always seemed to have a boat load of people from Ohio. They all seemed to be well-to-do and just a little bit better than us originals.
But actually, they were just kids and they were something that a lot of kids, even back in the good old days, were not: they were nice.
I don't know if it was the water. I don't know if it was the planets all aligned and created an Age of Aquarius in that zip code. I don't know if it was the parents. I knew someone the parents. Many of them were great. Many of them were nuts.
But the 70's are long gone. Joe Cocker died a couple of weeks ago. John Belushi, who did a spot on impression of him, died 32 years before. East Cobb, while parts of it are still very tony and nice, the neighborhood Wheeler is in, is showing its age.
The other day, my wife and I met a guy I went to high school with for dinner. He was in town for a funeral, Another member of our class was there too.
I was sitting there thinking, "I'm finally sitting at the cool table". My two classmates are doing well. One went to Duke. The other went to Georgia Tech. While little old me went to Kennesaw State. But here's what was great. There was none of this "pretension" of "Oh, you went to that little school on I-75". Rather, it was acceptance of who I was and who I am.
As you might have guessed, I didn't have the greatest self image back in my high schools days. Back then, people really didn't care. I always thought, and I have the numbers to back this up, that I just wasn't good enough.
What I didn't know then is that all the kids felt this way, for some odd reason. We just had different ways of trying to cope with it. Some took drugs/booze. Some went sex crazy. Some turned to God. Some turned to trying to be the smartest student on earth. Some turned to making snide snarky remarks in the back of the class.
But now we are at the other end of life. And I look back and I realize I can't think of anyone I went to high school with that I don't like. They just are all great people. The best.
My classmates have encountered significant challenges. Their lives have not been "easy" by any stretch of the imagination. Their challenges were just different than mine. I am happy to report that if I had to grade their responses to their challenges, I would have given each one an "A". But, then again, I am prejudice.
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