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Summer 2009
They say you should never look back. Live in the now, look to the future, plan ahead, never regret a thing. On that last point I think I will always come up short for there are things I’ll always regret. As for the rest of these admonitions, I guess they make some sense, yet lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the past. When I used to visit my grandmother in the nursing home (that good woman almost attained 99 years but checked out a few weeks early because, she said, she was bored) she would tell me stories about her girlhood with such remarkable clarity that she surprised both herself and me. She would ask how this could be, and I suspected she was testing me. In any case, I always came up empty and she’d smile and offer the next story, content that some things don’t always have answers and knowing the answers probably wasn’t all that important. So here I sit, remembering details of my early life and hoping that life will prove as interesting as my grandmother’s. Not a chance.
We are also told that when we look back, we see things as better than they really were. I agree, but only to a point. Some things WERE better. Television programs weren’t so plentiful, (when do hundreds of channels become too much?) and in the early days had to have some uplifting moral. Movies actually had plots that were dramatic, thoughtful, challenging, and with clearly-defined heroes and heroines. Families most often ate dinner together and (gasp!) actually TALKED about things. We weren’t always reachable. “Wait until your father gets home!” actually meant that you had to wait until your father got home because your mother couldn’t immediately call, Email, page, or text the fact that you were a pinhead worthy of corporal punishment forthwith. I must tell you, though, the waiting was often more painful than the actual the discipline. In a peculiar way it taught me the power of anticipation…. But the good thing was you could take off for the day and not be bothered by electronic signals and no one was angry with you afterwards because you didn’t answer your cell. People are often angry with me today for that very reason and I try to explain why it’s not a bad thing to be out of pocket and able to be alone with your own thoughts.
So where is this mini rant going? Nowhere necessarily but gee, I do feel a lot better having shared these thoughts. It was fun remembering growing up on a street where everybody ate dinner at the same time, where games were made up on the spot, where diplomacy and quick thinking often saved you from a punch in the nose, where you could screech up to the dinner table at the last minute, eat, help clear the table and wash the dishes and only then realize, when you went to your room to do your homework, that you were in the wrong house. I think people were a bit more polite in their dealings with one another, were more civil in the marketplace of business and politics. I think people were more respectful of one another’s ideas, perhaps a bit more tolerant.
Okay, you’re thinking, he’s officially old or why else this gentle carping? I think this has always been the way of things, this looking back to what we believe were better times. And I don’t apologize for it, for if I could not look back, then how could I remember these last three years at the Sandwich Community School as such a special time in my life? How would I recall the unique talents of the people I worked with, the exceptional teachers who shared their gifts, our eager students, especially the very youngest who never failed to put a smile back on my face when smiling was the hardest thing to do? How would I remember that for a short time people trusted me with their school, taught me, supported me, encouraged me and I hope, thought well of me? Enough. Goodbye, and thanks for the memories.
Jim Lehane
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