The Right Kind of …
My new book, The Right Kind of Boy, is almost ready for publication. In fact, I could have the e-book version up in a day or two. I’ve been delaying its release because, in some ways, it is even more personal and hits even closer to home than my previous book.
The Right Kind of Boy begins where Always a Runner ends, with a dramatic race at the Pasco Invitational Track and Field Meet, which is THE major regular-season competition for high school athletes in my part of the world.
The two main protagonists who face off in that epic race not only come away with different results (someone had to win, and someone had to lose, which is the power and glory of elite racing, even at the high school level) but also need to vanquish very different personal demons.
And in the conclusion of Always a Runner, we see whether or not Mike Beck is able to subdue his personal demons successfully, but we don’t know much about his antagonist in that race, Jonah Hart. The Right Kind of Boy tells Jonah’s story from the point of view of the days leading up to what he knows to be the biggest race of his life and in the days and weeks following the race.
Readers who have read Always a Runner will notice immediately that Jonah is everything that Mike is not. Mike does not care much what people think of him, but Jonah’s chief ambition, aside from never losing a race, is to be considered “the right kind of boy” by people who matter, and at first, he seems to be succeeding.
Doing what is necessary to be “the right kind of boy” seems to be the best way to be thought of the way Jonah wants the “right kind of people to think of him”.
Here is what I think Jonah would have said had someone asked him about this once he had gained some distance from those events and had experienced enough of life as an adult to realize that what his adolescent self believed was important really didn’t matter much at all.
“I was wrong, though, because most kids, even those who were not the “right kind,” grew up to be way different than what the adults and the cool kids expected when they were in school. Now, I realize the version of ourselves imposed by the official and de facto powers that had control over who we seem to be in our teen years bears little resemblance to the people we eventually become. Something happens once we’re released from the bondage of other people’s assumptions and expectations. If I’d known then what I know now, I think I’d have gone to more parties. I didn’t know what it all meant, but with the passage of time, I’ve come to realize that a wedge had been driven between who I was and who I thought I should be. I’d become, somehow, incomplete.”
It is of course graduation season. I used to tell my students that if they were in exactly the same place emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually a year from now, then they have wasted a year of their life. My point to those students was that once they are released from the confines of other people’s expectations, they would finally, and for the first time, be free to pursue a life based on what they want rather than what other people need.
That is, being the right kind of boy (or girl) matters much less than being an authentic young man or woman.