I’m (Not) Walkin’

by Thomas Greco, Publisher

Recently, I found myself scrolling through my Facebook feed when I came across a post that got me thinking.

Ironically, it was written by my niece. She asked a question about the lack of student parking at the high school (her son recently bought his first car). Predictably, there were an alarming amount of replies stating how “entitled your kid is” or how “we used to walk to school every day when I went to school,” blah blah blah. Needless to say, I had to text her and ask if she knew of any available spots! LOL. I also reminded her that posting on Facebook with the hope of getting a productive answer or winning an argument was akin to professional wrestling: win or lose, it’s not real.

But of course, it made me think back to when I was in school and what I did to go to and from school. And that led me down the usual rabbit hole…

I am not proud of this statement, but it is what it is. Throughout my entire elementary, middle and high school life, I NEVER ONCE walked to school. EVER.

Now, maybe if I lived in a big town or a city, that would not be much of a big deal. A lot of kids never walked because of busing. But that wasn’t the case here. Nutley is TWO square miles. It’s not like we lived far. My grammar school was exactly .4 miles away. An eight-minute walk. Piece of cake, right? Not for little Tommy. 

So my mom drove me to school every day, from Kindergarten to 12th grade. Even better, she would pick me up for lunch, bring me home and make my beloved jelly sandwiches (no peanut butter!), cut neatly into 16 one-inch squares with all the crust removed, then take me back. At 3:15pm, she was parked on the curb, waiting for me when the school day ended. 

Then I graduated from grammar school and headed to middle school. Which was .9 miles away, a daunting 21-minute walk. You might think I must have walked to school sometime, maybe on a beautiful spring day? Not a chance. My mom did get a break though, since we weren’t allowed to leave the building during lunch in middle school. And since the walk home was littered with tons of great stores like the Candy Corner, Santini’s pizza, Jack’s Sweet Shoppe and Dolly’s hamburgers, I never minded walking home. I was probably the only kid in town to gain weight walking a mile every day. 

Onto high school. You might think, now that I was a teenager, that I would want to become more responsible. Eh, you would be wrong. I mean, the high school was exactly a full mile away from my house! You think I would give up an extra 22 minutes of sleep? Listen. I didn’t even learn to tie my shoes properly until ninth grade because I refused to get off the couch to go to school in the morning. My mom would put my shoes on, tie them, throw water in my face and drag me into our Cadillac. 

After school was not much different. Our freshman football team actually practiced on a field 1.6 miles away (150-foot climb!). Hell, that was a 38-minute walk UP HILL!! That wasn’t gonna work. So, there was my mom, parked outside the gym every day at 2:38pm. Of course, I made sure to offer the best players a ride in the green Caddy. I was lazy, but I wasn’t dumb. 

I only lasted a couple years playing sports, so by my junior year, I was back to getting a ride home. By then, a lot of my friends had cars, so I didn’t have to bother my mom. In December of my senior year, I finally got my license. But I didn’t have a car yet, so yes, until the day I graduated, my mom drove me to school. By that time, my dad had a Lincoln Continental that was the size of a small yacht. Once in a while, he would let me take it to school. I would park it in a shopping center parking lot behind the high school. I mention that because I had one of my favorite memories in that parking lot. Again, I may have been a spoiled brat, but I wasn’t stupid. 

I made sure every hot girl in my class knew I was driving this expensive car, so of course, they all wanted to go to lunch with me. There I was, walking to the car like a sheik with my harem behind me, when the 20-year-old girl (Big Eyes) I was having quarterly rendezvous with walked out of a store and came over, grabbed my hand, hugged and passionately kissed me. “Nice to see you,” she said. I turned and looked at my harem. All eight girls were like, “We never knew HE was a stud!”

Well, that’s what I thought they were thinking. Turns out that without the Lincoln, the next day I was still just the lazy spoiled brat who couldn’t tie his shoes, getting dropped off by his mommy.

Want more? Check out the November 2024 issue of New Jersey Automotive!