The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Stepping away from the everyday grind of work, I get to relax by watching how my kids grow up. Ok... so, no relaxation there either. I watch how they interact with other kids, how they pick their friends, how they act when they have guests over, etc. How do I avoid the mistakes my own parents made? How do I realize that I've fallen into the same trap before it's too late? It's so easy to make snap judgements without taking the time to think about the impact to their young lives. How do I know if I'm doing right?

I often wonder how they fit in in their own strata of society. When I ask questions about certain other kids in their school, it's amusing to hear their response and to see their body language as they answer. "He's with the popular crowd", using both hands to sign the "double quote" around "popular". Or, "He's strange and is on Ritalin most of the time". Wow. Sometimes their friends are identified by other attributes, such as "the kid that can play the Super Mario Bros theme music on the piano". One of the more amusing characterizations recently was "he's in a growth spurt. It looks like he's wearing Capri pants all the time".

As I watch my own kids deal with school, I can't help but think back to my own days of prepubescent angst. Way back then, I hung out with a set of symbiotic friends that seemed to need each others company in order feel more important, or to have a better sense of self worth, or sometimes just to get by in school. Every day after school, I walked home with this motley crew: the cool guy, the fat kid, the greasy haired kid, and me, the ugly bookworm kid.

My feeling was that the cool guy (aka the handsome guy and the popular guy, but I'll just call him cool) needed us around him in order to feel superior...that we were walking home 'in his direction' and were tagging along. The fat kid was his best friend from who knows when, and they lived just a few houses apart. His mom always had snacks for us. (go figure) The greasy haired kid had the ping-pong table in his garage and access to his dad's locked-away playboy and penthouse magazine collections. That was always a good place to hang out for a little while. He knew exactly what time his mom and dad came home from work, so he never got caught in his dad's "library".

Me? I always had all the homework answers.

The popular girls would always look past the 3 of us in order to talk with the cool guy. Passing cars containing older brothers or friends would occasionally stop along the roadway and if they did, they would always pick up the cool guy and leave the rest of us in the dust. But we needed to be around the cool guy in order to be near those members of the opposite sex... a requirement for any boy that age. So we accepted being 'ditched' on occasion. We needed the cool guy to validate our existence. To certify us as people that deserved to live.

On occasion, a fifth person, the jock, would walk home with us. He was super athletic and was one of the first non-Samoan guys I knew that had facial hair. And muscles. Girls would flock to him like flies to you-know-what. In later years (high school), I shared a locker with the jock. He 'kept me around' because I helped him with his Chemistry class. (Yeah, he wasn't too muscular inside the head. hehe). For obvious reasons, I enjoyed sharing a locker with him, because that naturally meant that the locker area would always be swarming with young women wanting to talk to the jock. Ignoring me, of course.

So what happened to these guys? The cool guy went on to a career selling Craftsman tools at Sears. He's married and has children. Still as cool as ever. Even his little kids are cool. "Pimpin'", as he once said recently. The fat kid is now the fat man, married w/children. The greasy haired kid worked for a while in the produce department at a grocery store, maybe as a career. Who knows. He sorta fell off the map somewhere. The jock is doing landscaping work. Still a muscular fella, but he's settled down with children. No, the girls don't flock no mo'.

I'm still the ugly bookworm kid.