Reconnections

MySpace, Facebook, what's with it all?  I have a difficult time believing most of today's kids are actually able to climb a tree or make a snowman (snowperson) because of the influence of technology on their lives. Undeniably, Facebook is a convenient way to connect with old friends and family.  In many respects these kinds of sites have become the new playground for young people.  I have felt this way not because I am a technophobe, but more because I'm nostalgic. Circumstances, though, have a way of changing a guy.   Let me explain.

 

Recently my seventh graders completed a unit in poetry.  During that time we considered a variety of themes, one of them -- unfulfilled dreams -- connected strongly with students who were genuinely interested in sharing personal dreams, some that had actually come true, and many that had not. On the final day of our poetry unit students asked me if there were any dreams during my life that had not come.  I honestly believed at that moment I could answer no – that is until my sight landed on a photograph I had weeks earlier taped to a file cabinet.  

 

The photograph is of me and two childhood buddies from the days in the Detroit Public Schools; we had run into each other in the river of fans exiting the Comerica Park after the Tigers' opener.  By fate the three of us intersected. That chance encounter brought back a flood of memories, and for a brief period of time we laughed, remembered some of the old days, took the photograph that hangs in my classroom,  then hugged good-bye.

 

Thing is, that photograph is a reminder of a once hoped-for dream that was unfulfilled.  Those two buddies and several more of us had our own collective dream in eighth grade: to attend the same high school and have a championship football team.  

 

We believed we were the young Detroit Lions. We talked about our superstar futures every day and could not wait to be in high school together to make it happen; it was a dream deferred only by what time remained that year and the upcoming summer. Unfortunately for us it was 1975; Detroit was in the midst of enacting a court-ordered school district busing program designed to “mix things up” by taking inner-city kids and sending them to outlying schools and visa-versa, effectively breaking apart what we all thought would be a once-in-a-lifetime athletic opportunity, carelessly dividing us guys, sending us to several different schools, schools we had previously feared. Our dreams vanished before us in the name of a greater good called desegregation.  

 

While I am sure the intention of decision-makers to implement desegregation by way of inter-school student exchanges was done with positive intentions, I am not sure that they realized how many kids – minority or not – were in a very real way shortchanged, not because of politics or prejudice, or race, but because of proximity, of developmental continuity disconnected, because of friendships broken apart. We had been a band of brothers of all ethnicities and color and our dreams had changed because of one judge's decision in the name of social balance.  What the judge did not realize was, regardless of who we were, something bigger was lost:  kids' dreams to  stick together and play some ball. 

 

Detroit was our city.  It was our life.  My unrealized dream of playing football with my grade school buddies was made worse not only by distance,  it was bolstered by increasing levels of crime in a city on the brink of decay echoed by the screams of chainsaws and shredders eliminating the once numerous Dutch elms that had formed great tunnels over our streets.

 

And so I -- along with most of my friends of yesterday -- am estranged from our town, our dreams, estranged from what had once been a wonderful central city experience.  

 

I live in Toledo now.  It is a very nice city, possessing many of the same attributes of the Detroit of my youth, in many respects like a part of the Detroit never having been affected by change.  

 

I am a Teacher who believes in dreams that can be realized in part with family and friends that remain connected, not divided or separated by mandates or rulings the way a bunch of decent kids were, who thought they would one day wear the same letterman jackets.

 

“Mr. B.,  Mr. B,” a few students called, waking me from what had become a daydream of my own dream unfulfilled.  

“Were you daydreaming?” they asked.

“I was.”  I answered, shocked at my admission.

“What about?”

I pointed to the photograph.  “Those guys,” I said.  “And meeting them on Facebook.”