Darcy and I have been blessed to have our niece live with us.  She has been a lot of fun to have at the house, she is a great kid and really is the type of person that never sees the bad in anyone.  She was having issues with her choice of friends and so she came to live with us.  We have had the pleasure of having her from the end of her freshman year of High School.  She will graduate from High School this afternoon.

She has struggled with school, reading isn't one of her strengths and she honestly struggles reading.  It took us a while to realize that she does really well if someone reads out loud while she follows along, this breakthrough helped her a great deal.

So now that she is on the cusp of starting her life on her own, I sit and think what advice can I give her?  This is new territory for me, Darcy and I are unable to have children, so Jacque was it for us.  I remember when I graduated from High School back in the dark ages, also known as the early 1980's, I thought that the world would just give in to my every whim and desire, and that as long as I kept working things would be alright.

I don't know for sure if that is what the kids of today think or not.  I know that I worked a job all through my final two years of High School, and was a better person for it.  Now the NEA tells parents that children should not work, they will get higher grades, according to them.  I remember spending free time with my buddies at the park playing tackle football with no pads nor helmets, and the trees were in play, so if you ran into one of them, you could still be tackled.

Now with the XBoxes, IPods, Cell phones, and what ever other gadget there is, I don't know if kids are better off than we were.  We knew who are friends were, we also knew which of these friends was the most likely to get you into to trouble if you let them take the lead.  We hung out, and the Police didn't care, the gas station where I worked had a couple of arcade games in the back, and the owner of the gas station loved having us hang out there playing the games and spending our money.

We played steal the flag and kick the can after dark, and no one cared, some adults even asked if they could join in.  Once in awhile we would play baseball, or basketball after it cooled down later in the summer and early fall.  It was a great time.  My parents and their generation did a fantastic job of making sure that it was great and safe for us to be kids.  Bad things happened, but they were the exception and certainly not the rule.  There was a great hope for us as we looked into the future, but there was also a great joy in being 18 and mostly carefree.

My parents didn't have a lot of money, I am sure that to a lot of people, we would have been considered to be poor, but we didn't know it if we were.  Now we have all these great things to entertain our youngsters, but are they better off than we were?  Have I left the world a better place than it was when I graduated High School?  I would have to answer no, even here in our rural area, I worry when Jacque goes to the park with her friends and she is graduating High School today!

The economic prospects really aren't any brighter for her than they were in 1982 when I graduated, it was tough then, as it is now. 

I guess that I should stop and thank all who have allowed me to ramble on about my own mortality and place in this world!  Thanks!  Make it a Great Week!