At the end of my junior year in high school, my parents moved us from Elmwood Park to Franklin Park. And so, on a Monday afternoon in early May, I suddenly found myself sitting in a classroom in West Leyden High School, having started the day at Elmwood Park High School, clearing out my locker.
Because Leyden kids dressed differently than we did at EP, I endured taunts and jeers as I walked through the halls on that very first day.
Worse, I had a fine track season going that spring at EP, but that was over now. Because of IHSA transfer rules, I was ineligible that spring to run track at Leyden.
Worse still, I was slated to be the starting quarterback at EP my senior year, and also captain of the track team. All gone now.
It was, I was certain, the end of my life as I knew it. I was furious with my parents for victimizing me in this way, stealing my senior year from me.
But Mom and Dad were the kind of parents who always found a way to nudge me toward seeing the bright side of life, and rejecting the notion of victimhood. Sure, life won’t always go your way. But if you keep your heart and eyes open, you’ll find a silver lining to every dark cloud.
And of course, they were right. My friends from EP were still my friends, and by the middle of my senior year, I could claim an equal number of Leyden friends I never would have met if we hadn’t moved. I was eligible to play sports there my senior year, and I did.
Most important, I somehow blossomed from a shy kid to an extrovert. I developed a thick skin against teasing or taunting, and I found it easy to make new friends with people different from me — vital skills when I left for college only a year later.
So that “lost” EP senior year brought me gains in ways I could never have anticipated when it happened.
I thought of that “lost” year last week when I sat with my grandson Jack, who is finishing up his freshman year at Naperville North H.S. When I asked if he liked it there, he shrugged, because he had only been in the school building one day—freshman orientation. Since then, he has been a “Zoom” freshman, learning online exclusively.
I asked him how he liked his teachers, which classes were his favorites, and he answered as any high school kid would in any other time. Some of his teachers were really good, others not so much. He had favorite classes, but lamented that his favorite class was taught by one of his least favorite teachers. He shrugged, implying that he would survive the year, and maybe he’d have a better teacher next year in his favorite classes.
And I thought: “Atta boy, Jack!”
It would be easy for him — or any student today — to bemoan the special circumstances that lock them into a “lost” year that they’ll never get back. It would be easy for all of us to do the same, trading movies, dinners and concerts for jigsaw puzzles, and exiled from family and friends, some of whom may need us even more desperately than we may need them.
But to embrace our victimhood is to embrace the loss, rather than finding a way to see what we may gain or learn about ourselves through this kind of hardship.
I can’t say that my “lost” senior year is anything like Jack’s “lost” freshman year. After all, I ended up with twice the number of friends, and other benefits. But it didn’t feel like that at the time. At the time, it felt like “life over,” and it would have been easy for me to embrace my victimhood and to shut myself off from anyone or anything that West Leyden might have to offer.
That’s why it’s important for Jack (and all the rest of us) to refuse to accept our victimhood over a “lost” year, and to lean into whatever positives might blossom in our lives because of these special circumstances.
I cannot say what positives Jack might gain from a Zoom freshman year — we’re all way too close to that forest to see the trees. But if he keeps his heart and eyes open, what strengths and understandings may he gain that he would otherwise have missed? If nothing else, when life returns to normal, he will appreciate the inherent beauty and value of the kind of “normal” that any other generation might judge to be boring and mundane.
But if I find that he’s slipping into a victimhood funk, feeling sorry for his fate, maybe I’ll tell him about my father—his great-grandfather—who had to drop out of school for good after only three weeks of his high-school freshman year during the Great Depression. To help support the family, he got a job at a greenhouse that grew vegetables for hungry people. His job was to gather frozen cow manure with his bare hands and cart it back to the greenhouse to use as fertilizer.
From that experience, he gained the stoic courage to sail ten years later to the Pacific and help America win the Second World War.
Today, nobody calls his generation “lost” because of all they had to give up. Rather, today we call them “The Greatest Generation.”
And suddenly, a Zooming freshman year — or a year of doing jigsaw puzzles instead of movies, dinners and concerts — doesn’t sound so bad, does it?
Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.
