Change

"People don't change."

You hear it a lot. It's largely untrue; most of us change over time, as we accumulate experience and knowledge. There are exceptions, and those are, generally, pretty sad.

At one of my high school reunions, I ran into an old classmate who hadn't changed at all. His clothes, hair, interests, attitudes and opinions all were frozen in amber. He'd aged a little, but it was like theatrical aging makeup applied to the 70s teen he'd been. As we caught up and we downed a few, he reminisced, glowingly, "remember all the hell we used to give Lee Jones?"

Yeah. I remembered.

Lee was autistic, I know now thanks to 21st century understanding and some personal experience. He was taller than anyone in his class, had greasy, brown hair, thick, unstylish glasses, and wore the same green army-surplus overcoat day in and day out, regardless of weather. He spoke with an odd, operatic, "Marvin the Martian" formality that was easy to mock if you were a talented mimic and social-climbing little weasel, like I was.

I knew, somewhere deep down, that it was bullying. I didn't do it to his face but I gleefully did my Lee initiation in exchange for laughter and whatever tiny social real estate it could secure, and in doing so endorsed and facilitated the worse things that came Lee's way.

I chuckled when they yelled cruel jeers at him. They threw things at him, and I snickered. And when one day, after Lee offered an annoyed protest, one of them hit him in the face several times, I stood by and did nothing.

I think about Lee from time to time. I have no idea if he finished high school or if he's even still alive. My fondest wish is that he found his niche and became a tech millionaire, deleting us all from his memory and going on to have a wonderful life, but in those pre-ADA days when autistic teens were ignored or branded troublemakers, those successes were even rarer than they are now. I think about him because I wish I'd done better, I wish I'd BEEN better.

...and because every day I send my incredible, super-smart, quirky, funny, odd-talking, teenage, autistic son to a public high school. Filled with high school students. Sometimes I pick him up and he's sad or frustrated and when I ask why, he won't say. And I hope his schoolmates are better than Lee's were, or if they're not better, then someone with more character than teenage me is standing by.

So yeah, unchanged drinking buddy at that long-ago reunion. I remember, but not with a smile. I hope if I saw you today, you wouldn't remember it fondly either.