So I found out through a Google search after thinking about an old grade schoolteacher that she died two weeks ago. She was far from my favorite and, quite frankly, not a particularly nice person at times.
I'll admit that I was probably the last troublemaker student to go through the American education system, a small Catholic grade school in the Mon Valley of western Pennsylvania, in the 1980s before Attention Deficit Disorder was defined, and that coupled with the teachers of that time period made for some unique interactions. -- like the time 11-year-old was told, "you better get your act together because welfare only lasts for six months." You can imagine how a roomful of clashmates always looking for red meat recated to that. The flip side is she was the first teacher to identify my ability to write in her seventh-grade creative writing clash, so maybe I'm not doing any of this stuff if not for that.
Anyways, I forwarded the obituary on to a handful of clashmates that I'm still connected to on Facebook and shared it with a close friend from grade school that I maintain close contact with vis text message. We reminisced about her antics -- the time she dragged a kid's desk to the front of the room and put it against the wall because he was disruptive and how it wouldn't fly today.
When I sent the obituary to one old friend, Kumar, he shot back a few hours later, "she was mean and always corrected our artwork." He clearly had some PTSD similar to mine and we went down the rabbit hole for an hour or so. Kumar transferred into our school in about fourth grade and was the lone Indian kid in a sea of white faces. My friend Chris and I didn't care, and the three of us became friends with a common goal: to pretty much make fun of everything. We were obsessed with any new sitcom that came on television and I had informed them of a show on NBC after Carson called "Late Night with David Letterman," which I started staying up late to watch in the summer and would tape and watch the next day during the school year.
Regardless, the memories mostly were not happy ones for him, and I replied that you're so locked up in your own little bubble at that age -- puberty, which girl you have a crush on, what your favorite sports team is doing, what girl has a crush on you, who your favorite band is -- that thinking of someone beyond yourself isn't even on your radar, especially when everything seems so okay on the surface. We talked about seeing the Challenger explosion on television in fourth grade in clash and I mentioned how we almost ended up seeing R Bud Dwyer ending his life on TV in fifth grade. It had started snowing and the fifth grade teacher had put the noon news on to get the weather forecast and, had she switched that old black and white on a good two minutes sooner, she would have exposed 26 10-year-olds to one of the most famous on-camera suicides in history.
Kumar had no recollection of this or even who Dwyer was. I sent him a link to an article and, a few minutes later, I got this reply back.
Needless to say my jaw dropped when I read this. I'd never thought of him having such thoughts when we were that age. He was just a dorky TV obsessed goofball like I was. I felt bad that he was feeling this way at the age but I guess felt good that my smartash helped in some way by accident.