A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to stop over and visit my mother and family back east as I returned home from a business trip. Got me to thinking about a question I was asked a few years ago -
"What was the downfall of the 'popular' kid in your high school?"
I've now been out of high school for 34 years; my own son will be graduating in June next year. So this was -and remains - an interesting question
My own honest, lived experience is this: for almost all of us, life is not like it is portrayed in television or movies. There is no tragic downfall. The cool, arrogant jock almost never gets any sort of cosmic retribution. The neglected, quiet kid does not triumph. My life was not screen-written by John Hughes, as I suspect yours wasn't.
For the most part, life just….goes on.
I went to a pretty run-of-the-mill high school. It was good, but not outstanding academically. A kid two years ahead of me - Class of 1986 - was the first from my school to be accepted into Harvard in 16 years. The only student as far as I know ever accepted into Princeton was a Westinghouse Science winner. By comparison, my son's high school, a public school here in San Francisco, had three graduates last year accepted to Harvard, and two to Princeton.
Athletically, it was a suburban school of less than 1000 students, so most of the sports teams were mediocre to poor. We weren’t a wealthy community, and we were not one destined to be showcased in a “feel good” movie starring some pretty young white woman and edgy, urban black guy.
I am guessing that most of you could probably relate to this.
Because of this, our “popular” kids were probably pretty unremarkable.
The most popular kid in my class was, unsurprisingly, a football player. Probably the best in our school, and so he was good. But he wasn’t good enough to get any sort of college scholarship.
The ‘cool group’ were largely made up of athletes who stood out among their peers but again, if the teams won as many games as they lost, it was a ‘good year.’
I graduated first in my class, so I guess I was in the ‘bookworm’ group. I had a small group of friends. Most of us looked at the in-group with some admixture of envy, jealousy, and if I am being perfectly, absolutely honest, a whiff of self-righteous disdain.
For those who ruled the roost, there was no “downfall” to speak of.
They ran the school until June 1988. Some went off to college. Some went straight to work. The ‘cool guy jock’ joined the Navy. I went away to school back east (Dartmouth), and aside from visiting my parents and family for Christmas, went back only once - to attend a friend’s wedding. My father died 25 years ago; my mother sold our family home 10 years ago and moved back home to Canada. I doubt that I’ll ever return.
There was a television show on, maybe 25 years ago, called “The Wonder Years.” It focused on the adolescent life of a kid named Kevin Arnold, set on a street that looked for all intents and purposes exactly like the one I lived on as a little kid in Garden Grove, California. Garden Grove is a relentlessly middle-class suburb in Orange County, about an hour south of Los Angeles.
Kevin’s life was not terribly unfamiliar to me. Few remarkable things ever happened. In one of the episodes, the narrator (played, I think, by Daniel Stern) observed that, in junior high, who you are is dictated by who sits next to you at lunch.
(As an odd aside, when I was a grad student, I had Fred Savage (who played Kevin Arnold) as an undergrad in one of my sections at Stanford.)
In one episode, an odd girl with three pigtails befriends Kevin. Kevin was desperate always to move up to the cool lunch table, and was off-put by the oddball’s attempts to be friends. He shuns her, and by the end of the episode, she moves away. At the close of the show, in his epilogue Kevin remarks that "no-one remembers much about the kids you were so desperate to impress as a kid.”
The reality is that almost none of us is destined for any sort of conventional “greatness.” We are destined to live the more or less “average” life. There are some triumphs. There are some failures. I personally do not consider it a ‘downfall’ that the BMOC ended up in a typical, middle-class job.
Thanks to Facebook, I found out that the jock who sat at the top of the cool table, after a stint in the Navy, turned out as an adult to be a pretty solid, nice, and empathetic guy who spends his time when not working helping needy people. It’s not what I would have imagined from a guy who I thought I had pegged as a 16 year old with a cocky attitude and a big mouth.
What he does now impresses me a lot more than his exploits on the football field or in the halls of my high school.
John Lennon once said that life is what happens when you’re making plans. Jobs. Families. Bills. Kids. Weddings. Funerals.
