While I am not 100% happy with what I will be leaving behind when I pass, I'm not at all sad about it either. My fairly recent travels have seen to that.
Life is coming full circle fast and late last winter when I got to hold a newborn infant while mom got herself organized a very warm joy. It was truly a spiritual bonding of old and new. I pray the infant grows up and has a good life.
I still enjoy watching the two children across the street playing in the yard. They sure grow like weeds.
Still, the thing that seems to have given me the most hope was the opportunity to chat with a number of high schoolers in a small town north of here on the 4th of July.
It let me know that the real America is still here and that it doesn't seem to be going anywhere in smaller towns that have a sense of community.
I talked to a group of high school guys and was somewhat floored to find that they were not being suckered into the 'if you don't go to college' crap and was pretty pleasantly surprised to see how many of them were headed into the various trades and the reasons for it.
One youngster blew off a pipefitters and a lineman's apprenticeship and was looking at either an electrician, plumbing or HVAC apprenticeship citing that those trades would enable him to open his own business after he got licensed. Smart cookie. I like the way he thought and I told him about the electrician I hired once that had gotten his Master Electrician ticket and worked as a one man show specializing in small jobs. He was a character. I was supposed to pay him $125 and when he was done I stuffed a quarter pint of Jim Beam in his pocket. He chuckled and said, "Just give me a hundred bucks."
Needless to say I gave him cash. The kid was about 17 and grinned. I do believe he had a mentor somewhere.
A brief chat with a couple of teenaged girls told me that life in the small town was a lot easier. I live in Official Suburbia and parents here tend to micromanage their children's lives with an overload of activities. There's swimming, baseball, gymnastics, band practice and anything in between designed to keep the kids off the streets and out of the pool halls and being overseen by watchful parents.
In small town America they pretty much just push the kids out the front door and tell them to come home when the street lights come on. There's far less of a childhood of planned activities.
What's interesting to note is the girls I spoke with seem to be a little different. They seemed have different socializing skills which I imagine they developed by being left to their own devices more often than their Official Suburbia counterparts. Without all the scheduled crap and left to each other for entertainment they do things like I did growing up such as finding their place in the pecking order and so on.
One of the girls had been born there, the other have moved from Official Suburbia and it sort of showed. The native born took her surroundings for granted and the transplant explained to me that she was grateful for having been moved there.
When I asked them if they'd ever watched the clouds float by and daydream? They both said they do that from time to time. I did that often while growing up and found it both relaxing and settling. They said they did, too.
I also chatted with a lot of people of child rearing years and for the most part really enjoyed living in a small town. They said that they felt safe there and that they felt they were getting a far better deal in Butler County than they would be getting in Allegheny. They also likes their police department which a few claimed it ran on common sense.
This was a place where people took advantage of opportunity. I spoke with an accountant that worked from home. Another guy was a basic wage earner and another was a shopkeeper. A couple were commuters that drove downtown and considered the commute a small price to pay.
A couple of years ago when I went there for fireworks there was a cop directing traffic and I asked him where a good place to park was and he told me to park on the lawn and pointed. When I got out of the car I realized I was parking on the PD lawn!
Another thing I discovered that made me feel that there's hope is that I've read recently some college kids are rebelling against their Marxist professors here and there. One of the couple of reports said that they dropped the class to protect their cumulative averages because they were afraid that he'd hurt them if he found out they were conservative. Others said that they wanted to learn the subject and not listen to his crap. Still, that's a pretty good sign.
Throughout my entire adult life I have tried to pass on the way of life I enjoyed to the next generation because I knew I was blessed by a good form of government. This is the land of opportunity.
The things I want to pass on to my heirs is not some kind of trust fund or pile of money. I want to pass them down tools to work with so they can create their own wealth. I want to give the younger generation opportunity. If my leftovers could give a grandniece or grandnephew a solid education or even my tools to get started with I'd be good with that.
On the other hand, it doesn't have to be family, either. I would gladly hand off a few of my electrical tools to a motivated kid that wants to go into the trade or my carpentry tools or whatever IF they were going to actually use them. I don't want to pass on possessions. I want to pass on opportunity.
It's been a couple of weeks since I have laid in the grass and watched the clouds float by and daydream. The weather looks good tomorrow. Maybe I'll take an hour out to do just that.
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