In two months, I’d be 13. One week away was fun, but like an eternity away from the pitcher’s mound, the only sport I would ever excel in. Seventh grade would be starting. We couldn’t wait. The year before, our seventh grade moved to a separate school four miles away. A new principal not following traditional discipline, instead believing you could reason with kids that age was in charge. The stories of chaos, some true, some not, made the place sound exciting to me. But the school fired the principal, and the new one was tough. So much for the wrong kind of fun I was looking for. But my grades went up. I still favored myself as a tough guy, but would find out the following Spring I wasn’t necessarily the cock of the walk, though it didn’t deter me from thinking I was. We moved to a new home around July. I had a clock radio in my room and listened to the latest songs for an hour or so before falling asleep. Every morning before the bus came, my neighbor, a little older, would walk to my driveway and we’d smoke a couple of cigarettes. He wasn’t there because he liked me, but I thought so at the time. It was because we had piles of dirt in front of the house from the excavator that hid us from the eyes of our parents while we smoked. I still remember the first day of school. I was in the new principal’s office within a few minutes after exiting the bus due to an incident that had occurred. It was a transformative year, though, and taught me how to write long paragraphs like this, literally from the episode on the first day. Sixty years ago was a great time to grow up.