Leaving a Legacy

I was thinking about high school this weekend. I was at West High watching my kids and my brother play soccer and as I sat up in the stands with Ty as he climbed all over the bleachers, I started thinking about all of the times that I played soccer on that field and how many football games I sat through and how many people I've gotten reconnected with over the past year who I knew twenty or more years ago. And what really struck me and bothered me, even on the drive home was the question, Who is going to tell our stories?

I think many of us like to imagine that our kids will sit around and tell stories about us after we're gone and, they will. But I'm not talking about stories that involve them or our lives with them. I mean those stories that we tell each other when we get together after long periods of time and they usually start with "Hey, remember when..." Those are the best stories, the ones worth telling and sharing over and over again and those are the stories that will get lost, many of them, in the passing of kids that make up my generation. So, amidst these morbid thoughts, along with some insane idea of somehow preserving an anthology of the "best of..." stories, I began thinking about the idea of having or leaving a legacy. Sometimes, when I'm writing, I like to let my mind wander and it does an amazing job of pulling the little details into play so that as the words begin to come so do these synchronistic (don't even know if that's a word) images that accompany them. They make sense in my mind and often, oddly enough, they seem to explicate the very thing that I was trying to explain in the first place. Maybe it's comparable to being on an acid trip. Then again, I've never dropped acid so I don't know. Here I sit, as the idea of a legacy begs for a definition while surrounded by all of these little snippets from today's curriculum: Argentina defeating Mexico, Peanut butter and chocolate ice cream, Ty shoving a green M & M up his nose (incidentally, he was watching tv and he put it in the wrong hole; yet another sound argument for shutting off the tube), dancing in the bathroom (yes, it's the only room in the house with a lock on the door so I go in there and cut loose, footloose), reading the newspaper and finishing 10, yes count them again, 10 loads of laundry...

Back to my point, I do have one. Oh yes, leaving a legacy. I have a friend and one of her siblings is dying. Cervical cancer, caught late. She is in treatment as I write this, but the prognosis is not good and for the benefit of my friend, details are not of importance here. What is important is that the conversation that I had with her reinforced what I've felt for a very long time. Maybe even as far back as when I was a kid. I can't remember how old I was exactly, but I remember thinking to myself that I wanted to do something to help. I didn't know who to help or how to go about it, but I had a feeling that my life should be about something bigger. As a kid, I didn't know what that meant. But as the years have gone on, I've discovered that it is absolutely necessary for me, for my survival, to make my life about something other than what it is; something more.

I've always been looking for the next thing; it might be a hobby or a sport or a way to challenge myself mentally. But in the context of altruism, I have a desire and I have, since I was a kid, to make a difference in people's lives. I mean, let's face it, I was never a genius or even that smart. I had to really work at school to get through. I'm a terrible procrastinator and I have a very short fuse. I lose interest in things as quickly as they interest me and I have difficulty finishing things unless they fascinate me. And people fascinate me. One other thing, I've never been great at any one thing, never... but I'm good at many things. I never quit, I have the will of an Olympian and the heart of a Rhino. Unfortunately, I also have the attention span of a gnat so sometimes the combination is fatal.

So, what will my legacy be? Of course, part of it will be my family, my children and hopefully, someday, their children. But, for me, it's got to be more than that. It's got to be more than raising good people and tithing and recycling. It's got to be more than saying hello to people, and picking up trash and giving money to the homeless. Bigger... It's got to be more than being a teacher or volunteering or coaching soccer. Huge... It's got to be more than working forty years and collecting a retirement so that I can sit around all day or play golf (actually that's on my list of things to learn), and donating blood and giving clothes and food and toys to Goodwill. Really Huge... It's got to be life changing. I don't want to live eighty or ninety or a hundred years if every day when I go to sleep, I don't feel like I did something, however small, that mattered. I know that's why when I'm not teaching, like right now, that I have difficulty functioning day to day. I have an incessant need to interact with students in an environment where there is a massive amount of give and take, and not just my giving and their taking. I learn as much from them as they do from me and they change me, each of them, just like I like to think that I change them. I like to think that.

My legacy is going to be... it doesn't have a name or a definition or even a shape. Instead, it is an idea, that because I am unique and because there truly is no one else just like me (Thank God); an idea that every endeavor that I take on will somehow contribute in a positive and forward moving manner to the human race. And that every chance that crosses my path where I can change the course of someone's life for the better, even in the smallest of ways, that I will accept that chance and take on that endeavor with humility and, that I will give it everything that I have, until I no longer have anything left to give.

Erma Bombeck, whose writing and wisdom I miss every day, wrote, "When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would have not a single bit of talent left and I could say, 'I used everything you gave me'"

"I used everything you gave me..." Words to live and to die by I think.