This afternoon I shall do something that I have not done in at least five years. I shall spend a bit of time on the campus of the high school from which I graduated in the penultimate decade of the last century. In recent years, I have distanced myself from it by choice. It has been my response to what I consider (both at the time it happened and now) to have been mistreatment of a first-class human being whose privilege has been mine to know and to call a friend since we graduated from W-H together way back when (although I swear only one of us looks essentially unchanged all these years later and is not the one of us who stares back at me in the bathroom mirror every morning).
Suffice it to say, what transpired got my Irish up. Five-plus years later, it remains elevated. Spoiler alert: It shall remain so given the unbearable likeness recent events bear to the repetition of history. Non-engagement is the rule. This afternoon is the exception.
For this afternoon, among those individuals who W-H shall honor at its annual Alumni Awards Ceremony is a long-time friend who happens to be among the people on this big blue marble I admire most of all. Matt Albano is a good a human being as I have ever known. For him, an exception must be made. Failing to do so would violate the code of conduct by which I try to live my life.
So, on this second Saturday of October, I shall - if only for a moment - go to what once upon a lifetime or two ago felt like home. Today, at least, it is a stop on the route of this particular bus.
-AK
No comments:
Post a Comment