“When I look back on all the crap I learned in High School

It’s a wonder I can think at all …”

Paul Simon considers this the most interesting part of his song, “Kodachrome”, a song which was banned in several places at several moments because Kodachrome was/is a word trademarked by the Eastman Kodak company. In marketing film for cameras, Eastman invented the word “Kodak” because he thought “K” was a strong letter. All of that aside, the notion that an unremarkable high school education served only to muddle cognitive efficiency for subsequent years grabbed a lot of attention.

When the song was released, I was in a doctoral program in the Human Relations Program offered by the Education Department of the University of Massachusetts. The department had been turbo-charged by a free-thinking rogue from Stanford, Dwight Allen, whose mission was the transformation of educational leadership to encourage innovation and social justice – an iniative that quickly devolved in my cohort to “schools without schooling”. I was also employed as a secondary school teacher (History of Rock and Roll, Popular Psychology) in my two years of part-time course work at UMASS, having barely completed the minimal requirements set by my secondary school and the equally minimal demands made by my college. 

I’ve kept my report cards and transcripts from those years, documents which I offered to my children as an antidote to the pressure cooker expectations of the schools they attended. They were far more successful than I was and found their way to colleges and careers that seem to have suited them. No debilitating display of awards and prizes from this side of the family to raise the temperature during their school years, so I offered my own tattered educational record as evidence of one way of surviving school without having learned much of anything, leaving them room to succeed when and how they wished.

The point is that I didn’t learn crap of any sort in High School; if my thinking is occasionally muddled or skewed, that’s on me. Occasionally is hardly the appropriate term these days as life seems to get foggier with every passing year. Why wouldn’t I be boggled after almost 80 years of bouncing around in a nation that went from ventriloquists performing on radio (?) to the Surgeon General begging for warnings on social media platforms. 

Here’s what I learned by the time I escaped from High School (actually a perfectly humane boarding school with some pretty nifty teachers, had I been unstuck enough to meet them halfway): The country looks like Beaver, Wally, Ozzie, Ricky Nelson, and John F. Kennedy; everyone in California hangs ten and drives beach buggies; people from other countries have amusing accents; people from the South and Texas have amusing accents; the invention of Tang was somehow connected with the Space Program; it’s funny to hear a large bus driver threaten to punch his wife and send her to the moon; drunks are funny; rural poor people are funny; it isn’t great to be Black in America; every generation is more financially successful than the preceding generation; science will solve all problems; cigarettes aren’t bad if they have a filter.

Times change. Heal all wounds? Maybe not so much.

Today Eastman Kodak limps along after bankruptcy, shaking their corporate fists at the scoundrels who created cameras that don’t need film and images that arrive instantly without having to be sent away to be processed. I’ve got boxes of Kodachromed memories I probably ought to scan and archive somewhere … except that I’m increasingly aware that nobody particularly cares what I thought was spectacular at the World’s Fair in New York in 1964. Spoiler alert- it’s not the Small World ride, which cost the equivalent of almost 10 dollars and which brought our own small world the most aggressive ear worm of all time. 

I think therefore I am.

Yeah, but if I don’t think, am I?

OK,here’s something I can blame on my pretty humane boarding school: Fondness for institutional food. 

When I travel, I prefer to find a cafeteria that offers aerated mashed potatoes and gummy gravy. Sure, sometimes that means eating in a Hospital cafeteria, shoveling globby broccoli away while folks sleepwalk down from waiting rooms. 

It’s a wonder I can think at all.