If I'm not mistaken, I believe this picture is from the 1988 Roscommon High School yearbook. The guy on the right with his eyes shut -- as many of my pictures from this era seem to feature, as if I was constantly dreaming my life -- is me. The name of the young lady in the middle is lost to the fog of my memory, sadly. But the guy in the lower right is Brent Koschtial, with whom I graduated that year. Two young adolescent males, both in the Academic Top 10 of the class, with the best in life yet to come. Or at least that's what I thought for me at the time.
Because if you wanted to be a kid in Roscommon in the mid to late '80s with the best in life already in place, you wanted to be Brent Koschtial. He checked all the boxes -- handsome and athletic, personable and intelligent, dating the girl everyone wanted to date -- that I could never hope to tick. And best of all, he wasn't a dick when he certainly could have been one, given his clear superiority to nearly everyone around him. While we weren't especially close, I don't ever recall him shunning me or clowning on me, not even when I rudely and briefly stopped over at his house during a cool kids get-together to which I was most certainly not invited. All I had on Brent was height, which is probably why I wore the vertical stripes in the photo to accentuate that difference.
Even when things seemed to unravel for him during our Senior year -- he beat some kid's ass pretty soundly, and I believe a water fountain was involved in some fashion -- it seemed in my adolescent mind to be a blip, a footnote to his story of success after success. In those days before social media, I didn't see him again for years after we graduated, and of the many people I sprinted away from after my time at RHS was finished, Brent was one of those guys that I always wondered about. What product did he invent? What policy did he create? How hot was the model that he ended up marrying?
While my memory gets more hazy with each passing year, I'm pretty certain of the last time I saw Brent, and it caused me to throw those questions right into the dust bin. It was just over a decade after we graduated, and I had just finished my second full year as an adjunct professor at Kirtland Community College. I ran into Brent at KCC after one of my classes -- he as a student, me as the "professor" -- and we did the slightly awkward 30-second life summation shuffle that people in our circumstances did and do. Once he found out what I was doing there, his eyes got wide, he smiled even wider, and he told me that he'd like to sign up for one of my Intro Psych sections. We both laughed at that thought, and went our separate ways. I never saw him alive again.
I can say with all honesty that the thought of Brent Koschtial in my class as a student frightened me to no end. Given my life-long embrace of negative self-talk, I believed that he would be the one to find out I was a charlatan and a fraud, getting by on callow entertainment and minimal effort instead of instructional skill and pedagogic mastery. (Closing in on twenty years of teaching, of course, and the jury's still out as to where I fit along that range.) Because at that moment in the KCC hallway, I saw Brent as who he was then, rather than who he was at that moment. I have little to no evidence that would allow me to interpret the twists and turns of Brent's life in a meaningful and valid fashion, with all the glib and superficial chatter of "potential" and "destiny" and such. Instead, I have only questions with no answers, lines of inquiry that will never be addressed to anyone's satisfaction. All I know for certain is that Brent is gone, and I'm sorry for his loss.
Well said Erik.
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