You’re Never Going to Believe This

Sometimes I think you and I grew up on different planets. The way life was when I was in middle school is so vastly different than what you are going through. I’m not going to be that grumpy old man and growl that my experience was better, I’ll just wistfully smile and say mine was very different.

What am I talking about? 

How about this..

No video games. Really, they hadn’t been invented yet. No Fortnight, or Pac Man, or even Pong. If you were in front of a screen it was a TV and you were watching Gilligan’s Island or The Brady Bunch or any of a score of classic TV shows that you can now find on YouTube.

Oh, and about that TV, it was black and white - do you know what that means? No color TV. I remember when my family got it’s first color TV and it was A-Mazing! And a big

screen television on those days was 23 inches. (As a point of reference, the TV hanging in my classroom is a 65”)

Our phones were screwed into the wall. No hand-held, portable devices. No social media, no Insta-worthy moments. We had no instant communication - no texting or anything like that. If you were lucky, you had a phone somewhere in your house that was out of the way and not in the main traffic pattern of the house. It’s awkward to call a girl on the phone with your mother making dinner five feet away. It I hadn’t had access to the phone in my dad’s office, I would have never spoken to my friends outside of school.

Cameras were a whole separate device and they came with something called “film.”  When you finished the role of film, you took it down to the drugstore or grocery store and they developed the pictures. The whole process took about a week and cost money. If the pictures didn’t come out well, too bad, that moment was long gone.

We listened to the radio. If your favorite group dropped a new song, you listened until the radio station played it. You could call and request it, but it was a long shot to even the through on the phone. It was always busy-busy-busy. Someone in our group of friends would usually have a portable AM/FM radio that we could listen too.

Oh, and Sundays. Nothing was open on Sundays except the occasional convenience store. It was against the law. No going to the mall, or grocery shopping or getting a hair cut or going to the nail salon. What was open? Church and some restaurants. It was just kind of assumed that everyone went to church and if you didn’t, people would judge you.

Sunday afternoon was a good time to hang out with your friends. Outside. Yes, our parents would send us outside to play. We’d go door-to-door gathering the kids in the neighborhood then go build a fort, play football or baseball, have a crab apple fight (Pro tip - grab the top of a trash can for a shield), walk the abandoned train tracks behind our neighborhood or walk downtown to Earnshaw’s drug store and get an ice cream or maybe buy a model kit or some candy. The point is we spent a LOT of time outside. 

Think about how very different my middle-school world was from your middle-school world. 

Can you even conceive what that was like?

If you could go back in time to my world, what would you miss the most from today?

You Know We Worry, Right?

I do not live in Lowell. In fact, most of your teachers don’t live in Lowell but we’re all tuned into what happens in this city. 

We hear and see things on TV and radio news, read in newspapers about things that happen, or see alerts on the internet. There are fires, shootings, stabbings, car accidents, really, any number of things happen in a city this size, and they happen every day. 

I am not saying Lowell is a bad place. I live in a similar-sized city and bad things happen there too. It’s just what happens in cities - Boston, the area’s largest city - is in the news every single day for something awful that has happened to someone.

When we hear “Lowell,” our fear is that something bad has happened to one of you or someone in your family. That concern is moderated by seeing you every day. It escalates during the long breaks in December, February, and April. The worst is the Summer break - six weeks of worry and concern without being able to check in on you. 

“During the Summer, every time I hear that something has happened in Lowell, my ears perk up and my heart skips a beat,” one teacher said to me not very long ago. 

There is nothing you or your teachers can do about this, but I thought you ought to know: Your teachers worry about you, when you’re not in school.