Me And Stanford

When I was a child I was a purely lousy student. Some kids will get an 80% on some exam and proclaim they stunk-up the test. I rarely got anything as good as an 80%. When I stunk-up a test I’d get something like a 26%. When I was in the 9th grade I had to take Algebra. The course mystified me from the first day of class. My grades were so horrific that my mother hired a private tutor. At the end of the first session the tutor wrote a note to my mother stating that I “lacked sufficient academic aptitude” to warrant the tutor’s services. As I dejectedly pronounced to my crestfallen mother, “Geez Mom, the tutor flunked me!“

Anyway, I’ve always been envious of those who are gifted scholastically. Consequently, when a friend of mine stated in her Facebook bio that she had attended Cornell University, I had to do something about it.

I’ve always liked the idea of going to Stanford. I think the fact that it’s on the West Coast has something to do with it. I’ve always thought of the Left Coast as kind of cool and hip. Heck, Hollywood is on the West Coast. But more importantly, Stanford is considered the “Harvard of the West”. In other words, the school has a great reputation. So, naturally, I put in my Facebook profile that I attended Stanford. Of course that’s not close to being the truth. I don’t even know exactly where Stanford is on a map. But a Facebook profile cannot determine what is a lie and what isn’t.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I decided I’d go to the Stanford website. I think I wanted to look at some photos of the campus that I had allegedly attended. Among other things, I found an official Facebook page that published the “Stanford Stories” of past and present students, stories written by the students themselves. I read two of the entrees and they were about young graduates who had always dreamed of going to Stanford, and how all their hopes and desires had ultimately been realized.

Well of course I was never a student, nevertheless I figured Stanford would enjoy my story, such as it is. After all, I could write a highly flattering story about how I too had wanted to be a Stanford student.

So I carefully composed the account of how I was not sufficiently blessed academically to go to Stanford, but if I were, I would have done anything to go to Stanford. “High praise considering I am an ordinary guy living in far-off Columbus, Ohio“, I proclaimed. I concluded my narrative by saying that I so admired their school that on my Facebook bio I had declared myself to be an “unofficial” alumni of Stanford University.

The next day I went back to the website to see if anyone had written a comment in response to my story. Well, not only was there no comment, but my story was nowhere to be found. For a moment I was somewhat surprised, and even kind of annoyed. After all, I had in essence said that a guy in a distant part of the country, a person not even affiliated with the school, held their university in the highest regard.

But when I sat back and thought about it for a few minutes, my story’s deletion really did make sense. In fact, I realized that I shouldn't have expected anything else. I mean, I posted a story on the Facebook page of an elite university, me, a guy who may have longed for higher learning, but was, in reality, failed by his own tutor. This was simply a case of one more school flunking me.

Fortunately, my Facebook bio doesn't care.

The Passage of Time

At this time I would like to state my formal objection to the passing of time. Yes, it’s really starting to bother me, the gradual changes that comes with time‘s ceaseless march. The main thing that aggravates me is that I seem to be constantly getting older. I’ve tried to come up with an answer, but as of yet I’ve been stymied. When I was sixteen I wished time would pass more quickly. I actually wanted to get older. Now that I'm almost sixty I'd like to have time stop altogether.

These days I’m constantly noticing unwanted sign posts that signify that, much to my chagrin, time is not standing still. Yesterday was particularly painful. I saw four separate indications that time is passing by. The first signpost appeared in the morning. I was filling my car with gas when the teenage kid using an adjacent pump asked me if I knew why the filling station referred to regular gas as “unleaded”. For just an instant I wondered if he were pulling my leg. Well of course he was asking sincerely. A few seconds of math and I calculated that the kid was at least ten years short of birth when lead was removed from gasoline.

The second signpost came about fifteen minutes later. I was awaiting my breakfast in a restaurant, sitting on a stool at the lunch counter. I overheard an older gentleman request that his son take a lot of pictures on the son’s vacation. “I’ll want to see some slides of my grandchildren,” the elder man pronounced. Slides? I’d forgotten all about slides and slideshows. In fact, I had to do some research to find out if slides were even used anymore. Not surprising, they have been made obsolete by the Digital Age. You won’t find many 8mm home movies either.

The next time-passing signpost came in mid afternoon. It was a gentleman smoking one of those heavy, wooden pipes. Yeah, he was sitting in an old car, waiting at a red light, the smoke puffing out of the top of his pipe like steam from a percolating coffee pot. He looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. I can’t honestly say when it was that I last saw someone smoking a heavy-duty hardwood pipe. Cigars and cigarettes are still around, especially cigarettes. And I’ve watched the TV show Cops where they’ve arrested someone with a homemade crack pipe. But it’s been years since I’ve seen a guy smoking an old-fashion tobacco pipe. But there he was, the interior of his ’91 Olds growing increasingly hazy with pipe smoke.

The final telltale sign of time passing came almost immediately thereafter. The pipe smoking man was thin, 40ish, dark-haired and bespectacled. He was a dead-ringer for the fictitious Henry Mitchell, the pipe-smoking father of comic strip legend Dennis the Menace. And there it was, the recollection of a bygone comic strip, and a character therein. Yeah, when it comes to the passage of time, even the funny pages can be merciless.