Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

Fiction for a Friday

We held him in awe, naturally. He had the deep, booming voice of a football coach - he was a football coach, and a very successful one at that. He had age and the imprimatur of championships and we imagined him Moeller’s Gerry Faust but without the aw-shucks enthusiasm or corny grin. A working class town like ours couldn’t afford the white-collar enthusiasm of a rich school. Vince Lombardi was his model, a coach who went to daily Mass while never forgetting that winning wasn't everything, it was the only thing.

He doubled as high school principal. We were a football catholic school designed to win championships and souls (the former the goal, the latter where convenient). Was it confusing that the soul-winners tried to win championships while the championship-winners never tried for souls? The devout Catholic senior English & Religion teachers were frosh & reserve football coaches respectively.

We knew the pecking order. Our principal was Moses and we were his children and the other teachers were slightly older children. He read the morning announcements basso profundo as we plotted ways to improve the football program.

He called us “rubes”, a term of affection, and would alter names for entertainment purposes. “Sackenheim” became “Wacky Sacky” and he would say it with such relish! His distinguished, gray-head would bob side-to-side with giddy emphasis. Most of us kept our profile low enough not to earn a nickname.

I had him for History class and the thing I most recall him teaching us - though he taught us much - was ‘planned obsolescence’. Naïve as I was, I was blown away by the audacity of it. That a corporation would produce a product designed to fail!

I also had him for Driver’s Ed. The great ones, the teachers who were memorable because they were honored and dominating, seemed to only address me once, and that would be a line I would recall for a lifetime. Ruth Winkbiner, whom one fellow sixth-grader screamed in the midst of class “I hate you!” (You can bet I awoke from my dream-state for that!), had said to me a few months before: “You are such a dreamer!”. It was the one address that year to me personally and I might've been honored by it regardless of substance, though in this instance the substance was sublime. “I am a dreamer!” I said, pleased with this new grist for dreams.

During Driver's Ed with the football coach - he was in the passenger seat while I drove! - he noted my exaggerated body leans (to impress him with my athleticism? Might he see in me wide receiver moves?) and said, “What, do you think you’re Mario Andretti?” I dreamed of a career in auto racing.

* * *
It's twenty years later and the theme of our class reunion is: “What happens at reunion, stays at reunion.” Yes that’s precisely how I always remembered her! Twenty years later, how little has changed!

It seemed to encapsulate the class, weaned on the thin gruel of ‘70s catechetics and the praise-and-worship songs of James Taylor: our reunion would be like Las Vegas, exactly like the culture at large, spiked with a dollop of planned obsolescence and carrying the implicit promise that something might just happen that you wish concealed...