Aw, hell. You won’t believe what I got myself into. So I’ll just tell you. I’m going to be a guest speaker at my old high school for career day.
Delicious irony #1: I never completed high school.
Delicious irony #2: Either they never bothered to check this fact, or they don’t care.
My dilemma came about innocently enough. Last week a favorite old teacher of mine (Home Economics—easy A) contacted me through the dark magic of the Internet and asked if I’d like to share the secret of my success. Hmm. Instantly, a cartoon devil and a cartoon angel appeared on my shoulders. The demon, as always, spoke first. “Righteous! That is soooo cool! You have to do it—just make it up as you go along—half of those snot rags won’t be listening. And you’ll get welcomed back to your old stomping grounds as a hero! You’ll probably even get to drink crappy coffee in the teachers’ lounge!”
And the angel whispered: “No, Colleen. It would be wrong. The other half of the snot rags would be listening, and it would be unethical for you to pretend that your creative successes in life have had anything to do with basic education.”
In the face of such brutal logic, the proud demon raged. He puffed out his little cinnamon-colored chest and scraped at the filthy sawdust floor of my brain with his cloven hoof, kicking up dirt and leaving all rational thought clouded in a sandstorm of bitter, congestive arrogance. “Don’t be lame!” He bellowed. “What are you, chicken?! BOK-BOK-BOK-BOK!”
Reeling, I hit reply, typed in an affirmative, and hit send. The angel shook her head sadly and floated away in the turquoise mist of higher aspiration, to the place where DVDs are returned on time, and vegetables are eaten at every meal.
“Wicked sweet, chica.” The demon paused and gave me the thumbs up before heading out the door. “I gotta go. Got to…uh, polish my horn—but when you get to school, tell the lunch lady I said hi. And tell her to keep playin’ that Powerball, ’cause ya never know!” Poof.
Now I’m stuck. The only way to redeem this situation is to tell them the truth. So here it is, kids. I hate to puncture those rock-star daydreams with a sharp economic truth, but your teachers are right: No high school diploma + no secondary education = twenty-odd years of minimum wage. Folks like me in the non-graduating class are more likely to bear children outside of committed relationships, and those children are susceptible to a veritable Russian roulette wheel of bad fortune. Substandard health care. Dangerous neighborhoods. Neglect. And the longer you wait to go back to school, the less likely it is to make any sort of difference in your income. (Pretty tough luck in the job market to be a forty-five-year-old with a brand-new associate’s degree.)
I can tell them about the regularly recurring intervals of social fear that I encounter in conversation with minds more educated than mine. How I pray the frozen smile and glassy stare will cover my ignorance until I can change the subject to something I’m well-versed in, like back issues of People. How I’ve made a spare living from tips, and from making comedic sport of every foolhardy choice I ever made. That when you make five bucks an hour, you can’t afford to be too proud—because wearing that neon dunce cap has paid the rent for me more than once.
Would I be on a different career path if I had earned my diploma all those years ago? I suppose not. Would I be better off? I’m sure of it. That little piece of paper is a building block, a support beam. A place to plan, to nurture life passions that can sustain us through to the end of one goal, and then another. I’ll tell them that in life, rarely are things so beautifully cut and dried, so simple, as showing up between the hours of 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. and working hard. Earning your marks. And if there’s one thing I learned to be, it’s a hard worker. It’s what makes me what I am. An unqualified success.
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