Down the Road

Photographs and stories by Jim Grey

Since 2007

Tag: high school

  • Embracing my inner geek

    Down the Road is on hiatus, returning Monday, 26 September. I’m rerunning old posts in the meantime. I have never been cool. When I was a teenager, I didn’t enjoy how being uncool marginalized me. So I tried to improve my coolness quotient. I wore hipper clothes. I joined clubs at school. I tried not…

  • Rolling with the transitions

    My older son graduated high school on Saturday. It’s a day for which I long have planned, but which, nevertheless, comes with some sadness. I was glad to celebrate this passage with him, though he said he felt much as I did when I graduated high school: “Dad, I’m a good student; was there ever…

  • Captured: Me, Van, July, 1982

    Here I am, a month away from turning 15, leaning on Dads’s big old Chevy van (read its story here) which is parked in my parents’ driveway. Oh man, does this photo stir up a lot inside me. First, I’m about the same age here as my youngest son, about whom I wrote on Wednesday. Second,…

  • Vintage TV: Beyond Our Control

    It was a TV show about TV, and there wasn’t a thing about the medium it didn’t lampoon and skewer. It was a sketch comedy before sketch comedies were cool – running an incredible 19 seasons starting in 1967, it beat Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Saturday Night Live to the air. It won awards; it…

  • Embracing my inner geek

    I have never been cool. When I was a teenager, I didn’t enjoy how being uncool marginalized me. So I tried to improve my coolness quotient. I wore hipper clothes. I joined clubs at school. I tried not to talk about things that really interested me, like writing computer programs. But it was all like…