Lessons Learned Growing Up

There is a book about learning life's essentials in kindergarten.  I have not read it but think it is true that much is learned early on, but more is learned later.  I think for us much was learned outside Schifani's store, in Inwood Park, and in the other sacred places of growing up.  Among the ideas I acquired in that two or three years we now call "adolescence" were:

1. When you have a job, you do it.  You do the whole thing, and if you don't like it you do it even better.
2. Whoever is with you, no matter that he be a jerk, is with you and so is your responsibility.  You take his back.
3. Each play of the game is the game.
4. Friends come first.  Family is important, but first come friends.
5. Trust is earned.
6. You do what is right and what is right may not always be what some might think.  It is instead what you know to be so.
7. If you only do what is expected, you get only what was predicted.
8. You don't ask.  People can offer, but you do not ask (and even when they offer, the initial inclination may be to say "no.")
9. If people cannot understand some things, explaining will make no difference since it is not a matter of reason or logic.
10. Being together is at least as significant as anything done together.
11. Integrity counts.
12. It is O.K. to be smart, especially if you can do other things too.  This applies to other skills as well (such as sports) so that one-sidedness, no matter how well developed, is more a limitation than an asset.
13. John Ford's movies (especially the westerns) embody a number of values.
14. Be contemptuous of emotional display, particularly of a public nature.  Feeling is O.K., but it is expressed in moderation at most.
15. If someone knocks you down, he does not win unless he can keep you down, so you keep getting up and you do it until that other person gives up.

Only later did I realize that some rules, no matter how long we have had them or with whom they are shared, might be good for only a time or a particular place, but not forever.  And so, some rules learned long ago have been incorporated or reaffirmed (most, in fact) and a couple have been allowed to end.