Ahh, I Can't Think of a Witty Title...

 

I'm nobody! Who are you?
 Are you nobody, too?
 Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
 They'd banish us, you know.

 

 How dreary to be somebody!
 How public, like a frog
 To tell your name the livelong day
 To an admiring bog!

 

-Emily Dickinson-

The world keeps getting smaller. People you knew years ago can show up while you're minding your own business getting the dull, ordinary chores done. What can surprise you from your half-asleep attention are the ends these people from the past came to.


There's a Quickie Mart in Seekonk I always use due to the lower taxes on gasoline across the border. Generally I don't run into many people I know while gassing up. On occasion I'll spot someone I know on the other side of the island and we spark up a quick “What have you been up to?” conversation that ends when the tank's filled. One time I ran across Morris who I hadn't seen since high school.


Morris was easily recognized. Back then, he had straight, flat and what looked like greasy hair that resembled the fur of a sick cat, collapsed and dull. He always had this and would constantly be brushing it from his eyes as it routinely kept falling across. He seemed annoyed by this.


Saint Raphael Academy was typical of your prep schools then. It wasn't Phillips Exeter in New Hampshire where you have to cough up $40,000 a year but there was an exclusionary taste to it, at least with some of the people there who felt they were privileged and made sure you knew it as well. The culture was odd at times too but then again, DeLasallian priests ran it. Those guys are a hair less crazy than the Jesuits.


Our senior year I noticed this. I witnessed some of the Brothers, in hallways, publicly comment on the futures of some of the graduating class. Of course, the ones who came from money, high on the social list or shone in some other way were commented on. One of the kids I saw lionized was Morris.


Morris, in comparison to the rest of us, was a genius. He excelled at pretty much anything academically and it was easy for him. He had a talent which afforded him an ability to work a little and gain great results. Morris on the other hand wasn't a looker and failed sort of miserably on the scratch test when it came to high school social standing. But, he still had an air of superiority about him due to his academic standing, sometimes grating as he served this to you with a quiet, insulting demeanor. It probably was all he had to show and tell and hold high. At times he would betray his inflated rank in the school by following some of us, like a puppy, trying to ingratiate himself with us, out of loneliness and wanting to fit in. He wasn't a bad kid, just another schmuck trying to make his way through high school realities.


The last I saw him, talked to him, he told me he was accepted to CalTech. Apparently his SAT's and recommendations from our school were enough to do it. “Jesus H. Christ” I thought to myself. That is one of the most demanding universities to get into. It's so restrictive that, as a student, you needed an FBI security clearance to work on some of your projects, as CalTech runs the JPL laboratory in Pasadena. JPL is where most of our space probes to the planets are controlled from. If you still don't understand this, think of Carl Sagan, he worked there for decades. If you weren't going to CalTech, you went to MIT or Cornell or nothing at all.


So, we graduate and we scatter to the four winds, each of us building a life and forgetting most of our classmates from high school as they aren't relevant in our lives anymore.


Then comes the day I'm gassing up my car in Seekonk several years later when I recognize the collapsed hair of the guy on the other side of the island.


“Morris...?” I ask.


Yep, it was him.


We talked a bit about the old times in high school of “What happened to this one and that one” when I asked about him and his life. He gave an evasive answer and tried to shift the subject to my life real quick.


Well, that was a mistake. I'm a nosy one and doing that to me brings out the detective in me.


I slyly pressure him into telling the truth, I can be good at that.


He had failed at CalTech and miserably too. He was bounced out nine months into his career there. I had asked if he discovered partying as that is usually a great reason to bomb out of college. But he said it wasn't that at all. I believed him as he wasn't the type in high school either.


He didn't outright say it but I discovered the jist. He was competing against the best the world has to offer when it comes to undergraduate science students. Kids from Korea, Japan, Germany and all over managed to spar against him easily. He wasn't good enough to survive the insane rigors of Caltech and was cut from the team in nine months.  That's quick. He told me he was now living back at home and working, at then popular, Block Buster video.


I was then reminded again, back in Saint Ray's, of how a Brother said somewhat loudly that Morris would excel in life, that his future seemed assured. I wonder how much of a disservice that might have been. Then again, if you are the largest frog in a small pond and then you move to the world's greatest swamp and you get your head handed to you, it should be of no surprise. I can't imagine what it must feel like to have been King of the Little Pond only to be shown, to be proven beyond a doubt, that you were just mediocre.

JPL's a small city unto itself. Cal Tech is HUGE and this is just a small part of it