Today, however, due to the eccentricity of the task I wish to tackle, I will put those undertakings to shame. I will actively take notes of the events and observations of my expedition to my hometown, and start the foundation of my essay while driving down the interstate for four hours. I will also videotape myself during my observations. Throughout the course of the assignment, I will try to discuss, evaluate, and eventually hope to understand some of the ponderables of life that I encounter on the way home. I know and accept the fact that writing a paper while driving is extremely dangerous to me, my passenger, (for her protection and anonymity, we shall refer to her as Ajax 314), and anyone else that may happen to be on or within an 8 mile radius of the road at the time of my travels. I will disregard all of this danger in the pursuit of knowledge, fame, and a possible cure for world hunger. An additional factor is the fact that my professor said I needed to take active real-time notes of the event that I am observing, and I can’t really take real-time notes of me driving home if I am not, in fact, driving home while taking notes. So there, my children, is the paradox of my assignment and the reason why we are all here, in a physical and metaphysical sense. Take that to your neighborhood rabbi.
Ajax 314 and I began our trip, as all great adventurers throughout time have (including Marco Polo, Columbus, Gandhi, and like Harold and Kumar should have), by driving through to get something to eat at McDonald’s. The impersonal voice that seemed to come out of a picture of a McGreasy on the menu board asked me what I wanted. I was in a very agreeable mood due to the fact that I was hanging with Ajax 314, so I related my order to the McGreasy in my nicest, home grown, tone. I pulled around to the second window, and what do ya know, the fries weren’t ready. Some kind of terrible grease accident in back. We were moving nowhere fast, so I began a friendly conversation with the newly discovered true identity of the McGreasy. (Rather than a luscious, fattening, grease smothered one of a million burger, I saw what at first sight was an peculiar, plump, and slightly sweaty middle aged woman.)
In our five minutes of verbal contact, the McGreasy, who I learned also went by the alias of ‘Janice,’ began shooting the shit with me about everything from the terrible manager she was working under, to the road construction on I-80, to the ‘D’ that her daughter brought home from school the day before. Janice’s humanity blindsided me like that bullet did Tupac. I found myself holding sympathy for this single mother trying to make her way through the world, trying to slice out her piece of the American Dream. The sympathy soon turned to admiration as I realized through our conversation that my sympathy was not welcome at her window. This woman had strength; she felt that she needed no special treatment, and she was going to get where she was going on her own two feet. Her work was humble, but her resolve to do it the best way she knew was not. She wore a smile for the entire five minutes of our collision in space and time, and then, as abruptly as our interaction began, my fries were done, and it ended.
With our bellies full and a smile upon our face, we set of into the Great Known of western Nebraska. If you‘ve ever traveled I-80, you know that the scenery isn‘t that amazing; Rolling hills, windmills, corn, cows, run down towns, corn, the occasional bird splattered across the window. This isn’t the kind of place you shoot a movie. This is the kind of place people go to die when they can’t afford to retire in Florida. In the defense of the tedious landscape, it is an impeccable opportunity to dose off into thought, another driving activity that brings safety to the masses.
Somewhere about 80 miles outside of Lincoln’s insanity, I stumbled on to a paradox that I share with what is probably every college student at one time or another. While in high school, I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of that town, and the further away I could get, the better. Yet now, on the verge of returning to everything that I had once known familiar, I had butterflies of excitement and anxiety in my gut. I was looking forward to seeing the people I had once been sick of, the streets I was once bored with, and sitting on the back porch with my father, which I had rarely made time to do while in high school.
I’ve hypothesized for a time that I am a paramour of change. Yet; I was bitter for years when my parents forced me to move from my hometown when I was 11, I felt like my world may have been over on the day of my graduation, and in the present, the last thing on my list of desires right after the death of a family member, is the negative change in my status of relationship with Ajax 314.
I, along with the youth of middle America, fear change, yet love it. For you mathematicians, I <3 change="Fear.">
The byproduct highlight of our venture home, in my opinion, was the football game that we were going to stop by. The event pitted my old high school team that I had once played with in greatness, and later lead to mediocrity, against one of the five teams that had spoiled my hopes of an undefeated season last year. The prognosis was gloomy, but my hopes of seeing a spark, or at least a glint in their play were high.
For the first half of the game, the fulfillment of my hopes was hollow. The process of sucking had begun the year before. For seven years before that year, we had been nearly untouchable. We had run up seven consecutive district titles, one state championship, and averaged just a little more than one loss per year. Until last year, my personal record in games that I had played was 20-3. In my junior year, we had out scored our opponents by a total of around 340 to 45. Then, my senior year, bad things started to happen. We tripped once, then again. Eventually, we had a regular season record of 4-4, the worst in memory. Then we graduated, and the world went on.
This year, however, things were worse, and the game that I watched that Friday night showed no mercy in proving that. The kids I had tried to encourage for those years had lost all hope and passion. There used to be an intensity in our games that you could only find in movies like Braveheart and Troy; now it looked less robust than a scene of Bingo at the local nursing home. The seniors out there paid no attention to form, couldn’t remember their plays, and didn’t even want to be out there. Time after time I watched their opponents use the simplest dive plays to cut through our lines like an Elizabeth Taylor through husbands. After 12 minutes of play, it was 20-0, and not in our favor.
It seemed odd that the cheerleaders were so peppy. They actually seemed excited to be there, unlike the football, players. According to the look in their eyes, they took especial pride in the fact that they could spell the word POWER, even when the other team was mopping up the field with our metaphorical corpses. There was also a plethora of grade school kids around having the time of their lives. When the local newsman came around with his camera, they would hold up their index finger and yell senseless things at the top of their lungs. The reality of the fact was not that we were number one, but had only won one game that season. They didn’t care, or really know what was going on. Ignorance is bliss… Why do we put so much work in to disposing of it?
I could have never imagined what happened next to save me from the torture of watching my alma mater get spanked. A young man walked up to where I was sitting, sat down, and gave me the long missed greeting I hadn’t heard since I left high school: “‘Sup Whitey?” I didn’t recognize him at first, but after a bit I realized that this was a now 8th grade kid that I had hated a year earlier. There’s something about 7th graders that just annoys the hell out of me. The squeaky voices, the constant deer-in-the-headlights look in their eyes, the lack of hygiene, I don’t know. All I know is that I can half-jokingly say that the only good 7th grader is a dead 7th grader.
Something had changed this year though. Physically, he looked like he had grown 3 or 4 years, but mentally, I could have sworn the kid was 10 years older. He talked to me like he realized that there was a world outside of his head, and like he knew that someday, he was going to have to carry some responsibility in something. He really drew a smile on my face when he told me he was the quarterback of the Junior High football team, and that that week, he had put up 200 passing yards and 180 rushing yards against a school that was a class above us.
This kept my mind off of the game long enough for the coaches to put in the Sophomores and Freshmen. My spirits were lifted even higher when I saw our Freshmen start manhandling theirs. In the past, we had been great. In the future, we would be great. Taking a few years off isn’t so bad I guess.
The game ended 41-7. But after my conversation with that young man, I was able to walk away with a serene grin on my face, imagining things in the future; change in the future. That night, my worrying mind let go of its paternal attachment of that team. Now I’ll sit back and watch it grow. It feels great.
After the game, we picked up some passengers and continued on with the last leg of the journey home. The passengers in danger now included Ajax 314, her sister, and my second cousin. This was a common group of friends this summer, so it was kind of just like old times, except not. I don’t really miss my former life, but am somewhat content with what it has grown into. I believe the boy I once was and the old man I will one day be would and will be ok with this day. Who knew that a drive home could stimulate so much thought? We should really avoid that from now on…
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