Legacy

The internet has connected me with friends, classmates, business associates, etc. from the past that I otherwise might have never heard from. Once in a while, someone will bring up something I said, wrote or did decades ago that no longer resided in my conscious mind, if ever. That is, one of these inconsequential (to me) things stuck with them and is vivid enough that they can quote it or describe it in detail. I’ve been on the other end of that, but it still makes me ponder about the tracks I’ve left. I’m thinking of this today because I was in a pre-holiday exchange of good wishes and remembrances with some friends of my youth today. One of them cited a quote from ninth grade, “You can’t stuff a marshmallow into a piggybank.” The fact that it was greeted by a chorus of LOLs (and variations thereof) told me it was tattooed in everyone’s grey matter. Mr. Allison was our football coach, but he also taught safety education. You didn’t have to be Roget to figure out that this was a euphemism for sex education. While it was needed in the Philadelphia school system, they probably encoded it to minimize the ruffling of feathers. Early in the course, a boy asked Mr. Allison about the physical reaction he had sometimes when around girls. I suppose this question emerged every year because Mr. Allison was obviously ready with the aforementioned quote for a response. I’ve run into people who graduated before or after me and this has come up, so I’m sure it wasn’t just our class. Since it came up today, I was trying to recall one other thing Mr. Allison ever said in class or on the field. I came up dry. I emailed a few of the guys and they struck out. So that’s it. Thirty (or whatever) years of teaching and coaching, and that’s your legacy. The marshmallow. Hope I fare better.