Ms. Atkinson

Saturday 5/9/26

You see all these posts of people doing the generation thing. I don't like any of this. The forfeiting of identity in favor of group-based identity. You should be you and you alone. When I see the "You know you're Generation X..." people doing the thing they constantly do, I know all I need to know about that person. They aren't a person. Not as I'd define a person. They are not a "you." They are a "them."

I'm interested in the past only insofar as it informs my present. If there is something from the past, or my past, that I motivates me towards a future I hope to experience, or something that I wish to have in a different future form, then that thing isn't really part of the past. It's fluid. And out front.

Looking back and nostalgia for the sake of each is a form of dying and death. It's the siren song of losing yourself, of not advancing, of not growing. It'll kill you dead inside. It's laying down in the cold park at night because it'd be so easy to nod off on that bench, and never waking up again. It's dangerous, and you must be careful not to fall under the sway of the siren's song, as so many--most--so readily do.

People create a great clamor about that which merits little mention. Someone, for instance, will go on about how back in their day, you didn't have water bottles at school! You maybe got a drink or two at the water fountain and that was it!

Then, other people express disbelief that this could have ever been a thing.

The Bunker Hill Monument opens at 1. I often start my days at midnight. When those doors open and I enter the obelisk, I've often had nothing to drink save coffee. Not a mouthful of water. I've certainly not eaten anything. I go up, down, up, down. I return home. I drink water.

It's not a big deal. I may drink a great deal of water. In the end, I have quite a bit of water each day.

People will be as soft as they're allowed to be. Kids without water bottles weren't parched at school. You were fine.

But this did cause me to call to mind something that occurred when I was in first grade, which would never happen now.

At the time, I was perhaps as one would have expected me to be. I wasn't like other children. I didn't think or talk like them. Of course, I played so many sports and was always doing that with my friends, and doing stuff in the woods and getting up to all kinds of games. We were always playing games. You weren't inside doing things with your friends. Lots of bike riding. There was a rumor of an especially large snake, so off you'd go to try and find it. That kind of thing.

My first grade teacher was named Ms. Atkinson. One day, a classmate of mine came in late. And I remember her talking to him at her desk. She gave him some money. Her own money. In order for him to get something to eat. She then summoned me to her desk as well, and said that she wanted me to accompany him to this cafe across the street on the edge of the village green.

Okay. Seemed normal enough. Off the two of us went. He got what he got and then we came back.

It isn't uncommon for me to think about this. The quiet kindness of this teacher. The giving nature. And what the boy might have been going through in his life outside of school. What she knew about that. What I certainly didn't at the time.

Imagine this now, though? She'd have been arrested. Maybe never would have taught again. And think of all these high school students who don't know their home address. Can't sign their name. Don't know their phone number.

But at the time, there wasn't anything to see here. First grade me was up to the task. I'm sure others would have been. The teacher was kind. Empathetic. I hope things improved for the boy. Nothing like this came up again at school, so far as I knew, which, admittedly, might not mean that much. I was, after all, in first grade.

Sometimes I think that's all there is when it comes to any goodness in this world. These "small," quiet acts of kindness. When you hear tell of them now, it's like getting a report of a miracle. When people do something positive for another, it's so often for show, for self-advancement, "clout." It's done in order that it can be broadcasted. On social media. In the hopes of making a buck, garnering attention.

There are thousands of things I remember from that school year. But this is the thing from that year that I think about the most, the past that isn't confined to the past for me, and that is only past in the sense that back then was when it happened, but what happened may still inform my thinking now, and have a say in my future. And certainly with who I am now, and the future version of myself I may become.

Ms. Atkinson. Very kind.