I tend to suspect that if you had done things differently, you’d write with about the same same skill, but have more credentials.

When I was growing up, people believed that the demons one carried were small in comparison to that almighty degree, and that if one merely got the scholarships and the degrees they’d then seize the career that they weren’t ready for or didn’t believe would bring them what they were seeking. It is’t that education can’t be valuable Sometimes the larger priorities get lost.

An ironic memory: My mother, who wasn’t generally a pop music fan. liked the song Allentown — partly, I think, because she had lived in the ‘tri-city area’. It might even have been one of the songs that we sung in the car, on the trip from Front Royal to Winchester when I was ten or so: “IF we worked hard, IF we behaved/ so the graduations hang on the wall/ but they never really helped us at all…”The irony is that my mother taught me to work ‘hard and behave’, and I collected those graduations even though I already had an inkling of the limitations.

I hung out with an academic crowd in school, but I’ve often in the years since pondered In high school and college, the academic crew is the most mature, or seems to be. Time passes, overt and angry rebellion sometimes soften into other forms of rebellion, and then the lines blur or shift. I hung out with an academic crowd in school, but I’ve often in the years since pondered something… Well, I am not exaggerating a heck of a lot when I say that in the years since, I have never had a friend who graduated from college. Several, in fact, spent those years doing drugs.
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