A lot of things in life require a certain degree of distance in order to gain the proper perspective. Distance and time are undoubtedly the reason hindsight is always 20/20. In 1987 all I wanted was to put my hometown behind me and go see the world. Three decades later, all I wanted was to find my way back to my hometown.
The place I come from can’t simply be found on a map. Your smartphone GPS can drop you right smack in the middle of my hometown, but that’s not where I come from. Where I come from is as much a matter of chronology as it is geography. Unless Dr. Emmit Brown and Marty McFly actually got that Delorean to break the space-time continuum, you can never get to the place that made me…me. The fact that we can’t get there is unfortunate. I didn’t know it at the time, but the place that raised me was perfect.
Don’t get me wrong…I have no disillusions of growing up in a Utopian environment. Quite the opposite, at times we were a hot mess…but we were OUR hot mess. There were scandals and petty crime, gossip, tragedy and alcohol related incidents. But we always took care of each other.
Let’s start with geography. My hometown is nestled into the Ohio River Valley in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. I’ve said it before and I’m pretty sure I’ll go to my grave believing this to the depths of my soul: I’ve been around the world a dozen times, and the region I’m from is absolutely the most beautiful place on earth. The mountains, hills and hollows are alive. The soil is rich and it’s hard to find anything that won’t grow well there. Blankets of hardwood trees cover the hillsides that display the power of life with their deep greens in the summer months and the beauty of change in autumn as the greens slowly evolve into a radiant pallet of shades of orange, red and yellow that most inhabitants of this planet can only imagine. That overabundance of flora provides a habitat for the wide array of wildlife which flourish there. The river is absolutely gorgeous in that stretch of the valley. It’s wide, straight and deep, constantly flowing and at times threatening…but always beautiful. The combination of the mountains, hollows and river make for some of the most amazing sunsets I’ve ever witnessed. Add the wildlife and the early 20th century architecture and the photo opportunities are endless.
The chronological portion of this is a little more difficult to explain. Ya know…running around the in the armed forces for most of my adult life gave me the opportunity to spend time with a lot of people my age from different areas of the country. It seems that quite often when talking about the 80’s people tend to reference “The Breakfast Club”. I’m sure for a lot of suburban kids in the 80’s that movie reflected their life in High School…Not so much where I come from. In the Breakfast Club you had the nerd, the jock, the spoiled Prom Queen, the delinquent (stoner), and the weird chick. Well, I’d have to go back into the yearbooks and confirm some of this, but I’m almost positive I could find you a pretty damn weird prom or homecoming queen who had relatively high GPA and smoked grass after track or volleyball practice. Some of the stoners were phenomenal athletes, some of the athletes were phenomenal nerds, Prom and Homecoming Kings and Queens waited tables five nights a week and whether we’ll admit it or not most of us were a little odd and quite delinquent at times. No…John Hughes films don’t quite describe the 80’s where I’m from.
I guess if I had to explain it to someone from outside the area, I’d tell them to pick their favorite episode of the Andy Griffith Show and mash it up with their least favorite episode of Roseanne. The MTV and Miami Vice fashions popped into and out of our lives, but for the most part Levi’s, T-shirts and flannel were always in style. All types of music popped into and out of our lives but Rock and Roll stood the test of time. Nearly all of us were born into a blue collar environment in which we not only survived, but thrived.
Now….we weren’t “hicks” by any stretch of the imagination. We were a rural small town that a century earlier had been an oil boom town. If you didn’t slow down to look around, you could drive from one end of the town to the other in just a minute or two. But if you took a few minutes to investigate, we had a few restaurants, a few bars, grocery stores, flower shops, car dealerships…ya know…not everything you’d want, but everything you needed. If you wanted to you could live a comfortable life in that town and never leave the city limits.
The world seemed to revolve around the High School in that small town. Football was king without a doubt, but most of the other sporting events had a respectable following as well. The Marching Band stacked up a lot of trophies and for such a small school we had a strong music program. The community rallied around the school, buying advertisements, donating time and equipment and when necessary, manpower.
The river, hills and hollows made the place beautiful. The school gave us a flag to rally around. But those aren’t what made the place special…it was the people.
I’ve been fortunate enough to meet a lot of people from a lot of different places in my life. Hell, I know someone from everywhere. Upon first meeting me, it usually doesn’t take long for someone to ask me where I’m from. The region from which I hail has this strange twist of inner-city Italian and Appalachian in our accent. There’s a slight twang and a lot of the phraseology screams “Hillbilly” but then there’s words that don’t fit right. For example, I don’t think I ever uttered the word “y’all” until I’d lived in North Carolina for a few years….it was always “you’uns”. After a few minutes of conversation with people struggling to figure out whether I was the mutant offspring of Ellie Mae Clampett and Al Pacino the question would undoubtedly be asked: “Where the hell are you from?” Each and every one of those people will tell you that when the topic of the conversation changes to my hometown, my demeanor changes with it. Apparently (so I’ve been told) a little grin lights up my face and there’s a sparkle in my eyes. That sparkle….well, that’s the memories of the people who made me…well…me.
Through all the years meeting all the different people from all the different places there’s a few things I figured out. Some people come from great families; some have unbelievably dedicated friends; some people are fortunate enough to have great neighbors, and some luck into a teacher or coach that has a positive impact on them. But it’s rare…exceptionally rare…to be able to check that “all of the above” box when you talk about the people that made a difference in your life. I was lucky enough to be raised in a place where you had “all of the above” and more.
Ya know, when you watch those old John Hughes movies there’s always this very distinct dividing line between the people with money and those in the middle class…the proverbial “haves and have-nots”. A lot of the people I met in my travels who fell into my age group described one of the many John Hughes “Brat Pack” films as a mirror image of their teenage years. I don’t remember any of that where I was raised. Go back and look at his work from the 80’s: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000455/ We had some people with money and we had some who were a little less fortunate, but none of that really seemed to matter. I can never remember feeling that someone was above or below my social class. I can never remember feeling inadequate based on the amount of money in my pocket or whether my clothes were in style. That may be a blue collar thing…it really didn’t matter how well your family was doing, most of the time you were no more than one union meeting away from struggling. I don’t know…what I do know is the people who made me who I am were always more apt to pick me up than knock me down and the size of my wallet never seemed to matter in their decision.
“Bueller….Bueller….Bueller”. Another thing about those John Hughes films that always caught me as foreign was the clueless faculty at the schools. I don’t know if anyone reading this can look back on the education they received in high school with the same perspective I have, but there are things that have happened in my life that I know would’ve turned out differently had I not been educated in the time and place I was. You’re lucky if you get one teacher that reaches you and makes a difference in your life. I can’t think of a single teacher or coach that didn’t have a positive spin on my life and I was just an average student and probably a sub-par athlete. I know for a fact that my Biology, Anatomy & Physiology and Chemistry teachers should be credited with saving more lives on foreign shores than a lot of service members ever had to…as well as my Algebra and Health teachers. My grammar and literature teacher quite literally saved my career on more than one occasion. My art and shop teachers are possibly the sole saviors of my sanity. Had I not been fortunate enough to have history teachers passionate about the subject, I’d have missed out on a lot of opportunities in my travels. The lessons my coaches taught me are too numerous to list, but I will say that motivation, confidence, responsibility and leadership are intangible items that have no equal in the environment I chose to dwell in for most of my adult life.
But the classroom lessons were just the tip of the iceberg. The teachers I had in school honestly cared about you…not just your education. I don’t know how many times I had a teacher or coach pull me aside and ask me if everything was alright. I can’t count the number of times I got put in my place when I needed it. These people were teaching specific subjects in the classroom and teaching humanity in the hallways. I don’t know that you can find that anywhere today. You know what happens when someone shows you that they genuinely care? You find yourself not wanting to let that person down. So you pay a little better attention in class and you put forth a little more effort in the studies, on the field or on the court. When you start putting forth more effort it breeds an environment where those around you step it up a notch as well…and when someone shows you they care, you feel the need to show that same compassion to others. It’s infectious, and it’s contagious…and in the 80’s it turned that little school into a National School of Excellence, filled the trophy cases, and turned out some of the finest human beings I know…even after all the travels and all the people I’ve met from all over this planet, some of the best people I know I’ve called friends for nearly 50 years.
I can’t give sole credit to the educators though. A school can only be as good as the community that supports it. I read somewhere that a small town is nothing more than a big family. I had one mom and one dad, but I had an endless supply of parents who were seemingly never short of a hug or a kick in the ass, depending on what I needed at the time. There’s no less than five women in that town that I can’t bring myself to refer to as anything less than “Ma”. I have no way of remembering how many tables there are in that little town where I sat down to break bread, but I can think of eight just in my neighborhood. I had one blood sibling in the 80’s, but I had more adoptive brothers and sisters than any one man deserves, and if not for some of them it’s hard to tell where I’d have ended up.
Ya know…I get it…my perspective is a little skewed…maybe even biased a bit. I’ve talked to some people from that time and place who are bitter about things that happened 35 years ago. They’re holding on to grudges or maybe feel like they were dealt a bad hand in one situation or another. I’d never tell them they’re wrong for feeling the way they feel…that’s not my place. But in most cases it’s one or two unfortunate incidents that they’re holding onto and I think that really detracts from the overall picture of what an amazing situation we witnessed. Everybody sees things differently. I understand that. I also understand that regardless what I write out here, I’ll have a thousand people who walked the same halls and streets that I did who disagree with something I’m saying. It’s all about perspective.
So…My perspective.
I had a friend I’d grown up with visit the farm a couple years ago. We’d seen very little of each other over the last thirty years, but picked back up like we’d never known a day where we hadn’t talked. I walked down to the garage to grab us a couple beers and when I came back into the den I found him standing in front of my shadow box staring at all the shiny stuff I’d been awarded over my career. He looked at me a little differently when I handed him the beer and started asking questions with a tone of disbelief in his voice. He kept referring to the awards as things “I” had done and I was trying to find the words to explain the truth of the matter as I see it, but either the affects of the adult beverages or my being unprepared for the ambush I was currently under prevented me from finding the words. I just shrugged it off with a laugh and told him that all of those medals and a dollar will get me a cup of coffee at any McDonald’s.
What I couldn’t find the words to tell him that night was, “I” didn’t do that…WE did that. Regardless of profession, there are simply two types of people you’ll encounter; trained or untrained. I was prepared for what was coming before I ever got on the bus to basic training…because if you’re not prepared, you don’t survive basic training in the Marine Corps. Ya see, without the solid family, neighbors, teachers, coaches, community and friends none of that happens. Everyone who took an extra minute to teach me something that I wasn’t quite getting the hang of; everyone who went out of their way to correct me when I was wrong; everyone who helped build my confidence, taught me what leadership looked like, and ran the quit out of me; every bully that knocked me down and every friend that picked me back up; every hug, every kick in the pants, every pat on the back and slap in the face…EVERY LITTLE THING that made me…me. I am nothing more than a product of the environment that laid the foundation for everything that followed…the environment that raised me. Without a solid foundation any structure will crumble. My foundation…I didn’t build that…WE built that…I believe that to my bones.
It hurts my heart that the environment that raised me doesn’t exist anymore. I don’t know if an environment like that will ever exist again. Technology, school consolidation, political correctness…you can point your finger at a million different things, but at the end of the day I can’t find a place that feels like the place that raised me and it doesn’t matter what caused it…all that matters is it’s not there. Maybe things have improved and I just can’t see it. Perspective, right?
Wow….for the first time in my life I’m sitting here hoping that I’m missing something.