Heroes

I suppose the older you get the more the word hero changes. It sure has with me. When I was a little kid, you know, grade school. My heroes were always sports figures. I loved sports and those guys were just so bigger than life, so “how can they be that cool”? Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Kenny Stabler, Fred Belitnikof, Reggie Jackson, Bob Devaney, Anyone who had ever donned the uniform of the beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers. Heroes. It makes sense I guess. They were doing what I someday wanted to do. They were living the life I thought a hero lived, the life we all desired. They were whom I rooted for, bought posters of, had trading cards of. They were who we were each recess.
Moving on to junior high and high school I changed my outlook on heroes. My heroes now represented a whole different demographic entirely. The people I tended to look up to during those years were counterculture types. Musicians, older guys in town who liked to party and get high. The guys that didn’t just bend the rules they obliterated them. These guys were cool to me, they represented the dark side, everything my parents warned me against. As I look back on that now, I can only shake my head and feel cheated. None of those guys amounted to a pile of shit. Half of them ended up in jail, the other half died young, none of them deserved my respect.
Not until I began teaching did I really realize what a hero is. I started seeing kids who had parents in jail and prison, whose moms and dads were still sitting at the kitchen table drinking when they were trying to get their 4th grade selves to school on time, who didn’t have a buck and a half for the field trip because their mom needed cigarettes that morning. I saw kids who had only known poverty, abuse, and addiction in their homes. Kids became my heroes.
I still see those kids, 15 years later, and teaching a different grade level, I still see those kids. They are older, and more sophisticated, but they are still fighting the same battles. I don’t know, maybe I feel an immense amount of guilt about my own children. Maybe I feel bad about the things I did as a kid. They way I treated my parents, other kids, girls.
Anyhow, kids are my heroes, kids will always be my heroes and I hope like hell I can always be there to do something, anything to help these heroes become super heroes.