The Big Middle

On Friday, we attended a middle school graduation; young people were completing 8th grade, having been prepared for the next big step in education . . . the next step in adolescent development. . . moving on toward high school. In my youth, I had been at that stage in 1965. My class ascended past junior high school and into the big leagues, high school! So, at this special even, this morning, student and faculty speakers were talking about “middle” school, and students being prepared to enter “upper school.” It was a little strange to me, because where I grew up, we referred to these phases of life education as “junior high” school and high school. And then. . .for whatever reason. . . I know not what. . . I found myself contemplating this concept of “middle”. . . whatever that is . . . a word that can be used as an adjective or a noun. I was contemplating “middle age”, which is a period of life that I used to qualify for, but at age 74. . . maybe not. Now it’s more like. . . what they call “old age.” Even though I still feel like a middle aged person! Read ‘em and weep! Just kidding! It’s all good, y’all. Life is good, and there’s so much middle to muddle on. . . There’s the middle ages:

And there’s Middle Earth, an imaginary place dreamed up by J.R.R. Tolkien, where hobbits’s live, where the shire is something like a middle ages way of living. There’s the middle of the road, where the yellow line is, or the median, or whatever that keeps you from drifting over into oncoming traffic. . . . also the “middle of the road” in a symbolic political sense, where American citizens used to conduct their politics, back in the day. . .before magamania and the proud boys and their maralago donald attacked our Capitol, thereby magnetizing US politics so that most folks are either stubborn donkeys or lumbering elephants with not much in between. Then there’s the middle of the country, which is roughly somewhere between New Orleans and Chicago and between, say, Ohio and Iowa, between Alabama and Texas. . .or maybe between one side of Kent, Ohio and the other

Let us hope and pray that those middle schoolers are never confronted with soldiers who were sent out to to quash their Constitutionally-guaranteed rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and their first amendment right to free speech and free assembly in the middle of the land of the free and the home of the brave. King of Soul