Letters to my Stepdaughter II

This letter to my stepdaughter was written in late November of 2012.

Where was I?  Oh, I remember.  The ninth grade.  But first I must ramble.  You will indulge me because I’m at the age where I can get away with rambling.  I was just putting together some things to send to my kids for Christmas.  Old stuff.  Sports programs, newspaper articles (the sports kind, of course), stuff like that. I have programs from games I went to 50 years ago. It’s time to share them.  I have a number of things like that from my dad, including a preseason college football magazine from the 1930’s.  Back then college teams had offensive linemen who weighed less than 200 pounds. 

The ninth grade was much better.  By the fall of my ninth grade year (I was in a junior high so high school didn’t start until grade 10) I could almost talk to girls.  Almost.  I had discovered my maleness (and that is as much as I shall say about it, not that I am ashamed of human sexuality, it’s just that some things are appropriate and some things are not, depending on the circumstances) in the spring of the 7th grade,  and I liked girls.  Not enough to take the steps to try to have a girl friend (boy was I shy and goofy around girls), but I could dream, couldn’t I?  And there was football, which was becoming a big part of my life. I was 3rd string quarterback at the beginning of the season.  In the second game of the year, I got in the game at the end and carried the ball for a first down.  I can still remember the “high” that gave me.  The next week I got in at quarterback in a losing game and scored a touchdown.  From that point on I was the starting quarterback.  I threw two touchdown passes in my first start in the next game.  No holding back now.  From then on my goal was to be the starting quarterback at my high school in my senior year.  

A few years ago I was thinking back on my early years and I discovered something interesting.  My favorite years in growing up time were the 3rd grade, the 6th grade, the 9th grade, and the 12th grade.  I’m not going to try to come up with some weird reason why, it’s just the way it was. The worst thing about growing up for me was that I didn’t like the idea that this was not such a perfect world, the world of my dreams.  

I remember sitting on the bleachers in the gym during lunch on November 11, 1963. That was the thing to do in our junior high.  I was in the 7th grade.  All of a sudden I started hearing that President Kennedy had been shot.  I remember – this is one of those things that stuck with me – hearing a couple of kids saying “Hey, did you hear?  Kennedy kicked the bucket.”  It was something silly, something to be laughed at.  I didn’t believe it. I just thought it was some kind of junior high humor.  When I got to my first class after lunch, radio news was being piped in to each classroom via the public address system. Kennedy had been shot and the report said he had died. For the next three hours we listened to the news.  I don’t remember any of it, but it all seemed surreal.  The president was dead.  Even though my family was a Republican family, this was shocking.  It was a Friday so for the next three days I was pretty much glued to the television.  They said the assassin was Lee Harvey Oswald.  I was watching on tv on Sunday morning when a man named Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald on live tv. I watched the funeral on television on Monday.  School was out for the day.  

The reality of a fallen world. The murder of the President of the United States.  The interesting thing is that even events like that are soon forgotten. Christmas soon came, and a few weeks after that, the Beatles were on the Ed Sullivan show singing “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah” and the “British Invasion” was on.  MUCH better than any of YOUR generation’s music, of course.  LOL.  And not long after that I got my first ten-speed bicycle.  Life went on. Yet I had much to learn about its realities.