What do maggots and teachers have in common?

A friend of mine dropped a Lord of the Flies reference right in the middle of a recent conversation about her working environment.

My pithy response was not forthcoming because I remembered reading the book in 10^th grade English, but I was bored to sleep. I retained none of the book, which was my loss.

What I did remember was my teacher that year, his insistence we read classic works like The Odyssey and The Iliad and that the Isle of Lesbos is how we now have the term “lesbian.” Unfortunately, I couldn’t accurately spell his name.

The staff directory at Booker High School noted he was no longer working at the school. Eventually an internet search revealed I did spell Mr. Kulikowski’s surname properly.

That internet search led me to look at whether other teachers I remembered were still working at the schools they taught me. Though I hardly kept up with any of them, and it’s very likely they have forgotten about me, it seemed like a fun exercise.

Teachers may be undervalued and underpaid, but they have immense value in our society. It seems incomprehensible that the starting teacher’s salary is just $35,672. What’s worse was the legislatures that used the recession as cover to slash funding for schools, eliminate classroom positions and devalue public education.

Not every teacher is a memorable one, or someone worth exalting. There are parasites in every profession.

But as I looked back at the four public schools I attended I saw many of the people who molded my life are still molding the lives of others.

My fifth grade teacher, Dwana Washington, is still teaching at Emma E. Booker Elementary as a data coach. My seventh grade Social Studies teacher, who was the son of one of my Sunday School teachers, has probably been teaching my entire life and is still at Booker Middle School. Mr. Kulikowski is gone, but there are others who still remain at Booker High School. Meanwhile Skip Arrich, the hilarious physics teacher and very accomplished soccer coach — who once promised to let me start at striker if I aced his test — has been at Rockledge High School for at least 35 years.

The 90s seem like an eternity ago to me. To those professionals, it was probably back when they had fewer gray hairs and more control over their classrooms, but I digress.

Thinking about spending a couple decades at the same place is a bit mortifying. Though a handful of people have suggested I become a teacher, I immediately respond I’m not mature enough to teach.

I like learning, but was not a great student. I like sharing ideas and information, but abhor the prospect of teaching. Longtime journalist Bill Moyers may have summed up my attitude earlier this week in a conversation he had on “Charlie Rose” when he said “journalism has been a continuing course in adult education.”

Not all of us can be, or want to be, journalists. But Moyers struck a chord. Those of us who care to learn something every day should thank those who initially made learning fun — teachers.

Laughs and liveliness,

-Wb

Is it wrong to be nostalgic on occasion?

The first time I heard the song I was staying up late for no particular reason.

It was well past 1 a.m. and I was beginning to nod off as the television continued to play music videos that appeared to have little point. I told myself I would endure one more song before calling it a night.

Then I heard the song that made so much sense. John Mayer’s “No Such Thing” was a song that made me eagerly anticipate my 10 year high school reunion even though I was still months away from graduating high school.

In a perfect world, I would have returned to Rockledge High School with a beautiful girl. I would possess a decent job, one that took me to a seemingly exotic place beyond the borders of Brevard County, Florida as well as a red car that would put people on notice that in the decade since graduation I was more than the dork I appeared to be in high school.

Admittedly, the song motivated me, all the while stroking my ego.

(As fate, and the good Lord, would have it, I am marrying a beautiful girl in December, live in South Texas and drive a red car that suits my lifestyle as a sportswriter perfectly.)

The first five lines and the chorus always spoke to me. Surely the pricked the consciousness of others, otherwise, Mayer, the former gas station attendant, wouldn’t have been given a record deal.

"Welcome to the real world", she said to me
Condescendingly
Take a seat
Take your life
Plot it out in black and white

That’s what I do. My life is literally written in black and white. Every day it begins on computer screens, before moving to sheets of paper that few my age bother to read.

I wanna run through the halls of my high school
I wanna scream at the
Top of my lungs
I just found out there's no such thing as the real world
Just a lie you've got to rise above

When the single was released in February 2002, I was the last person off the bench for the Rockledge High soccer team.

On those cool nights across Central Florida I would usually sit there and watch my friends win, while carrying on a conversation with a friend who was a student manager. We talked about a host of things, some of which were what we were going to do when we left Rockledge for college that fall.

I always got the sense from those conversations on the bench that we would not let the perceptions of others, define us, shape who we would become. To us high school was a journey with a lesson at every corner if we stopped to pay attention.

Of course our conversations were rarely that deep on the sidelines. I think she was grabbing water and keeping stats, while I was hoping we would blowout another hapless opponent so I could play.

They read all the books but they can't find the answers
And all of our parents
They're getting older
I wonder if they've wished for anything better
While in their memories
Tiny tragedies

Some classmates became larger tragedies than others. One sadly committed suicide. A few others wound up in jail. And, it’s not a stretch to say there are more that are 180 degrees away from the dreams they had as idealistic seniors in a quaint Central Florida town.

On the other hand, there are so many that have become spouses, parents, doctors, lawyers, teachers, nurses, soldiers, models and overall successes. As we all approach 30, some of us faster than others, Mayer’s final stanza applies to all of us.

I just can't wait til my 10 year reunion
I'm gonna bust down the double doors
And when I stand on these tables before you
You will know what all this time was for

 Laughs and liveliness,

-Wb

What is your calling in the happy valley of life?

Paul William Bryant died the year before I was born. But he apparently was a legend in his occupation, one who was so revered that those who didn’t call him “Sir” simply called him “Bear.”

He was not a perfect man, but one who was an excellent molder and motivator of young men.

Joseph Vincent Paterno was like Bryant in that respect. Neither man was perfect, but there are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people that were inspired by the lessons both men taught.

Paterno died Sunday after complications from lung cancer at 85. Until November 9, 2011 Paterno coached at Pennsylvania State University since 1950. For context, the man who coldly told him of his termination over the telephone was born in 1954.

Paterno spent 31,442 days on this Earth. For all but a quarter of one percent of those days he was known as an honorable man who tried to do things the right way.

There will be some who say he died because of a guilty conscience in a child sex abuse scandal that has rocked his former employer. Others will claim he died of a broken heart because of how his career ended.

I would argue he died because his time on Earth was complete because Paterno, like Bryant, was put here to use athletics to mold boys into men. Both were humble men, yet idealistic about their legacies because of their unprecedented success. Sadly, both died within 90 days of coaching their final game.

Everyone has a coach or a teacher in their life that has genuinely touched them. If you do not, all I can do is pity you for missing your blessing. The lessons may not be evident immediately, but with reflection they will become apparent. While you are at it, thank those teachers, professors and coaches that have helped you along the way. Many of them are monetarily underpaid, so reimburse them with compliments.

Mike Shannon was the parent of a teammate. But to me, he was my first coach, back when I was a 4 year-old playing in a soccer league in Sarasota where the home field has been converted to a Par-3 golf course. I will never forget Larry Laskowski and Charles Stockton telling me to not wallow in self-pity, but celebrate with my teammates, after missing three extra points in a football game we won 47-6

But the most important coach in my life was a man named Bob Rowe. He is a small man in stature, but his lessons in kicking a football 50 yards and using football as a means to an education cast a larger shadow.

When I had a mental block that was preventing me from reaching my on-field potential, Coach Rowe told me “If you have done it once, you can do it a thousand times.”  To this day, I remind myself of that comment when an obstacle appears too conspicuous to overcome.

No one would deny Jim Tressel, Barry Switzer. Bobby Bowden and Jimmy Johnson are great football coaches. What separates those national championship winners from people like Jake Gaither, Eddie Robinson, Tom Osborne, Paterno and Bryant is that the latter group were highly successful AND used education to mold men.

"If you're not a man when you get there, you'll be a man before you leave," former NFL linebacker LaVar Arrington said of his Penn State experience. "Joe has his system so that you're prepared for life. Joe trains you more mentally than physically so that nothing will rattle you."

Ten days before Paterno’s career unceremoniously ended, I wrote a blog congratulating the champion and for taking some of the sheen off of himself to recognize others. Few people read it, which doesn’t bother me, but while people in my business were eviscerating the coach for all that he could and should have done a week later they were ignoring his humility in the limelight.

A family spokesperson told Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post one of Paterno’s final lucid thoughts to anyone outside his immediate family were used to think about others, a constant characteristic throughout his life.

“I’m happy in one sense that we called attention, throughout this state, and throughout the country probably, that this is going on,” Paterno said of the scandal that indirectly cost him his job. “It’s kind of been like a hidden thing. So maybe that’s good.”

Paterno’s life, legacy and death is another reminder that we must all find out why we were placed here on this earth. Through prayer, thinking, actions and occasionally failure our calling will come to us. There is as much honor as being a maid as there is in being the president if that is our calling.

Put more bluntly, without sanitation workers our lives would stink.

Laughs and liveliness,

-Wb

Does a "brand" burnish or burn?

Ten years ago I used to write poems and essays in a notebook aspiring to be popular.

Believe me, the content I produced at the time surely would not have motivated many clicks, or driven user generated content, or been linked to a sundry of web sites that were a half decade away from being created.

But, at the time, I wanted to be the person everyone at Rockledge High School knew and the man the good looking girls would want to sleep with. I wanted to be so well-known that freshmen aspired to be like me and recent graduates sought my time as validation they still mattered.

All of this came to mind when I stumbled across this column published in the Washington Post last month about branding. A humor columnist, who has a pair of Pulitzers, mocked the concept of people in journalism trying to make their name outside of their increasingly slipping work, stating “because we know that, in this frenetic fight for eyeballs at all costs, the attribute that is most rewarded is screeching ubiquity, not talent.”

That specifically brought back the summer before the Patriot Act, and my quest for adoration.

Admittedly, it was a highly egotistical pursuit. Perhaps it was an overreaction to being an overweight, backup placekicker with few friends. A person no one particularly missed once I slid out the door of my Sarasota high school, rarely to return.

Whatever it was, overhearing the tales of classmates copulating, or at least tell detailed stories of debauchery, led me to believe it was possible for me as well. In hindsight not becoming a Lothario was probably for the best.

A decade later everyone who would have been a candidate became a friend.

The girl who was kind enough to be my first date evolved into someone where we would hold long discussions on conservative politics. Another friend became a reminder that happiness and good things do happen to genuine people. And a third is an inspiration to follow my dreams—even if both our careers are not as successful as others would have imagined at this point in our lives.

As for the person who was to be my prom date? Well, in typical Will Brown fashion there was a miscommunication and it never came to fruition. But, the two of us do talk on occasion and high school is usually not one of our talking points.

Because I refused for any friendship, then or now, to be predicated on the “gauzy filler material, the pale fluff inside decorative throw pillows,” the popularity I always internally craved never came.

I never got the last laugh, or the trophy panties of my classmates. If the corresponding decade is any indicator of the future, there is a strong probability neither will happen.

But if it meant anything, the bespectacled, black placekicker who was admittedly socially awkward, but universally accepted as being smarter than the average Cheez Doodle, did receive the loudest cheer at graduation.

Laughs and liveliness,

-Wb

Where is home?

My brothers believe home is where you lay your head. But they are far more gregarious than I am. When they enter a room their peers instantly take note. Me, I am more inclined to slip in and observe my surroundings before being the fulcrum of attention.

This week a handful of people have asked where I’m from. The obvious answer is Florida. But, unless I am pressed I never provide a city. No one has yet to inquire further, but the idea of how to answer that question was one that led me to ask “where is home?”

Is it the ritzy city of money and retirees that hardly acknowledges it has a black population? Or is it the small town where nostalgia for it trumps all other memories? Perhaps the city that educated me and went from the bane of my existence to a begrudging enclave of peace.

My two outgoing brothers — one who is five years younger and the other who is 15 years older — would quip something about Victoria, Texas being my new home and I better get used to it. There would also be an unrepeatable joke from both that would make me laugh with politically incorrect delight.

As large as Texas is, it feels so quiet when I come home from work. Unlike Florida there is not a foundation of friends to lean upon in person here. I think it was mother who said it was a chance to reinvent myself as a journalist and become a better person since the only thing people out here knew about me is what I told them.

Outside of a summer in Shreveport and my two weeks in South Africa, I have lived in the most unique of the 50 states.

People have asked whether I am homesick or miss my Whitney. Honestly, I have not been away long enough to truly miss either. But I do know I will be reunited with both again.

#LifeinTexas, as I am fond of tweeting, is a learning experience. Not all of us are fortunate enough to have a chance to sink or swim, become a man or a mouse. It is a chance to figure out if I am going to be person or the pork.

I was a closeted emo kid for high school and early college, spending countless hours writing about feelings, emotions and other things interconnected with the eagerness and angst of leaving home. After A Decade Under the Influence of amateur then full-blown adulthood I realized Coming Home, wherever that may be, is not selling out.


Laughs and liveliness,

-Wb