I’ve always been different. In a time where no one really knows what the term “family” means anymore, my upbringing must look like something out of the 1960’s. Dad’s got the middle management job in a large aerospace firm. Mom’s the stay-at-home caretaker that cooks, cleans, and makes sure my younger brothers do their homework. Over and over, I hear the same things. People consider my family quaint, goofy.
I’ve got no issues with it. I’m a square. I’m the guy that went to Catholic school through grade school and actually paid attention to some of what I learned there. I don’t steal. I don’t smoke weed. I work 8 hours a day on the weekend, so I don’t party much. I’ve got no issues with that, I’m comfortable with my life. I could write about how tortured my childhood was and my life is, but the bottom line is that I’m a happy kid, and 95 percent of the time I’m having a good old time with my life.Nevertheless, I’ve always felt like I stick out. My Catholicism shouldn’t be that much of a sticking point with people. After all, there are millions of Catholics in America. Still, I often feel like it is. People look at me weird whenever this little word pops up in conversation: “CHURCH.” It’s a harmless enough word, but it sends shivers down a lot of people’s spines. “Sure, I’ll be there, but I’m going to hit church up for mass before I get there,” I’ll say on a Saturday afternoon, or “It’s time for me to hit the sack, I’m going to church in the morning,” at one o’clock on Saturday night.
The first time someone hears it, I can almost see the look of shock on his or her face. “HE goes to church???” the look says. “But he seems… so…so…NORMAL!”
Well, I AM normal. Ninety percent of us are. I’m not that sissy little white-boy that a lot of people picture when they envision the religion. I’ve been in my share of trouble, and I’ve done things and acted in ways that I’m not that proud of. I don’t thump bibles, ok? I’ve just been brought up in a religion and it means something to me, that’s all. I used to be an altar boy and (GASP) I still sing in church every now and then when the time is there. I was a choirboy back in the day, so sue me. Lock me up and give me one of those cool white jackets that will lock my arms up by my sides already. I’ll babble my life away and be happy with it. It’s not like I wasn’t doing the babbling anyway.
When I played high school basketball junior and senior year, I was probably one of five or six kids out of the twenty-five on JV and varsity who didn’t do some form of drugs or drink like a fiend. Not surprisingly, my brother was one of the others. It could have been the same family influence or something, I think.
Sitting in the locker room those days, I basically developed the rest of my sense of self. The team listened to rap music. I listened to Creed, Van Halen, and Pearl Jam. The team hit keggers on weekends. I worked until nine at night and then hit the bowling alley or pool hall with some friends. The team talked about which girls they had “been with” over the weekend. I smirked, because I knew that was something I didn’t really want like that. I used to think I was a thirty year-old trapped in a seventeen year-old’s body. Now I know better. I just always had different priorities.
Going away to college certainly didn’t help. “Dude, why won’t you smoke weed with us?” I hear. It’s a pretty simple answer, really. “I ain’t down with the stuff, bro,” I’ll tell them. It’s just not me, you know? I go to parties when the time is there, but there are just some things that I won’t try. I’m not down with the cheeba, the happy-grass, the reefer, the super sassafras, pot, bubonic chronic, or whatever else people enjoy these days. I don’t judge people who do it, but it’s not me.
Working isn’t much better for it sometimes. “Dude, you should pop pills (ecstasy) with me sometime. It’ll be fun,” one of my friends and co-workers at the grocery store will suggest.
“Sorry dude, not my thing,” I’ll say. After a while, people stop asking. They know better. They’re still my friends, and we still have a good time while we work. We do different things when we’re off the clock, though. As long as we respect each other there’s never any problems with it.
Don’t get me wrong. Being a decent guy with a heart has its downsides. I don’t pick up numbers at the frat very often, you know? Not that it’s a problem, but I’ve spent a fair share of time single. I’m looking for something good to come along, I guess.
At first I was leery of writing something like this, something that exposed so much of me to, oh, say the 20,000 people that will probably read this. Then I thought about it. Why hide who I am? I’ve been the same honest, decent, wisecracking jackass for years. Just like every other week that I write, this column is me. I don’t sugarcoat stuff anymore. I tell it how it is for me. If it makes me vulnerable to criticism, so be it.
The older I get the more I worry. I see friends and loved ones falling by the wayside lost, and I wonder what will happen to them. I’ve already lost several people I know to drunken driving. I’ve already seen the anger and arrests turn friends in directions I never thought that they would go. When I go back to high school to watch my old team play, I sit in the stands with classmates who have dropped out of school after they’ve had kids with one another. How will things be for them?
I watch as a friend makes plans to join the Army, then has life pull the rug out from under him when he gets caught and arrested with a smoking bowl, pills, and other drug paraphernalia on a Saturday night. He gets probation out of it. No more army, and no college or school either. I wonder how that part-time job at Stop and Shop will be when he’s 35.
In the end life is difficult because we can only plan for ourselves. I’d like to think that I’m doing everything I can do to be a success in life and be happy with my future. I can’t keep people I care about from making decisions that could hurt them, and often that hurts. People have to care enough about themselves to do that.
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