Post- by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2023-01-28T09:47:51+00:00

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There had been a couple at Danny’s father’s high school, both parties of which Danny’s dad had known since the early years of grade school. Thoroughly mediocre was more or less the extent of what you could say about them, he’d said. Boy’s daddy was a mechanic, mom stayed home. Girl’s daddy drove a truck, mom worked part time at the Kroger in Hudson, the one that’s a Target now. Both families’d had a whole crowd of kids. They were children of parents who were themselves children of folks born and raised in northeastern Ohio, all of which was normal back then—the functional, intact working-class families with crowds of children, dwelling inter-generationally in one basic region. Both had grown up in big houses in the inner ring of Cleveland suburbs, houses which had been feasible for such families to purchase at the time. The boy and girl had been middle children who’d worn nothing but hand-me-downs until they’d found independent sources of income, starting with the cash-in-hand odd jobs that you’d get in your early teens (e.g. babysitting, lawn mowing, paint scraping, weed pulling) and followed by the low-wage service jobs which were abundant and accessible to high school students in those days. Such jobs also used to be flexible regarding school schedules and after-school activities in a way that such unskilled jobs are no longer required to be, what with the illegal Mexicans waiting in the wings to snap up your position as soon as you tell your boss at the Dairy Queen you’ve got, like, basketball practice after school or whatever, all willing to work forty-plus hours for minimum wage or below—so who’s gonna hire a sixteen-year-old to work ten, fifteen hours a week? (This last bit of editorializing added in by a young-adult, marginally employed Danny, whose politics had veered towards something more hardline than the merely nativist during the Obama years.)

But so they’d taken the meager earnings of those entry-level jobs, this mediocre girl and boy, and gone to the movies, took the train into Cleveland to sneak into concerts, and adorned their physical persons in the unfortunate fashion of the mid-seventies. They’d acquired cases of beer through straw purchasers and consumed them in the woods with friends, Danny’s dad among them, always in a sort of fun and experimental rather than addictive and unhealthy way. Summer of junior year, they’d lied to their respective parents (the boy claiming he was visiting a grade-school friend who’d moved to Michigan, the girl saying she was spending the weekend at a friend’s summer cottage) and conducted an ill-fated though fondly remembered tryst, which had been discovered almost immediately by their respective parents and punished by several weeks of grounding.

The mediocrity of these two youths manifested itself in the academic realm as well. Each had received grades throughout the entirety of their respective academic tenures that indicated unambiguously that neither was destined for post-secondary education, nor for the ranks of the professions. The parents had shrugged at the steady Cs or perhaps gently admonished their not particularly high-achieving offspring.

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