Uncle Rico

You remember Uncle Rico, right? From “Napoleon Dynamite.” Uncle Rico used to love to talk about high school and how he wishes he could just go back and relive his glory days. Win that state championship, be the man, get the girl, and set his life on a whole different path from the one he ended up on. Well, at the risk of sounding like Uncle Rico, I want to share some thoughts here.

I’m on a group chat with my buddy Hammer and his brother Luke, and we’re always sharing hilarious memories and stories from high school. Either we’re all living in the past or there was something really special about the time and place where we grew up. Or, maybe, it’s a little bit of both. Whatever the case, we all have very fond and vivid memories of growing up in Norway, Michigan, that still make us laugh twenty plus years later. The people, places, and happenings provided priceless entertainment value on a daily basis. It was a simpler time in the world, before cell phones and really even the internet, and there was a genuine sense of innocence that came with growing up in a small town in Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula in the 1990s and early 2000s. I used to sit at the school cafeteria lunch table with my goofball friends and just think about how lucky I was to be alive in that time and place. One day, as senior year was coming to an end, I remember thinking, “Damn, I’ve eaten lunch with these guys pretty much every day for thirteen years. That sucks I won’t get to do this anymore.”

Life has moved on and my high school friends and I, in the blink of an eye, have all reached our 40s. We have families, careers, bills, and responsibilities. Hammer recently made a YouTube channel that has all our old football games from the fall of 2001. Ronberg field, the crowd, the coaches, my friends. They’re all still there, frozen in time.

Uncle Rico would love it.