Last week my son Christopher came home from college for the first time and couldn’t wait to get back to his old high school. He had only been away from town for 3 weeks, but he was more than a little excited to look the old place over; the center of his social life for the past 4 years. His senior class was about as big as ours, but he was far more popular than I was. Everybody knew and liked Christopher.
I went down to Louisville to pick him up and we no sooner got home than he was in his car and gone. Later that night I saw him at the football game. His shoulders were a little slouched and a lot of the excitement was gone. He wasn’t upset or depressed, just a little low. He saw how quickly things change, how one group moves on and another group takes their place. There were a lot of people who shook his hand and patted him on the back, kids and grownups alike, but it wasn’t the same. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it never would be.
I remember when I got home from basic training. I couldn’t wait to catch up on everything and everybody. Heck, I’d only been gone 6 weeks. It wasn’t the same. All the people I knew were gone or working or married and had started making lives of their own; lives that didn’t include me.
One day I went to the school, in uniform of course, and it was a completely different world, one that I was no longer part of. The only thing that made it bearable was running into Jimmy Littlefield who was there doing the same thing.
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