The Reward for Conformity is that Everyone Likes You Except Yourself

    I have a new math teacher, whose name I'll leave to your imagination.  He is the child of a dying race of a bygone era.  To give you some idea of what I mean, he graduated high school in the year 1974.  He must have been one of those rebellious spirits that marched, protested, and perhaps even fought.  Even now, with long silvery hair and a beard to match, the aura of intellectual power swirls about him.  As he stood before the class, towering above we mortals as a cliff stands over the sand, his every worded incited rebellion, individualism, a break from conventions.  I wished, in that moment, that he were a grandfather to me because I felt that we were as, Anne Shirley put it, "kindred spirits".  
    I hate math.  But according to this man, we do not learn math; rather, we memorize rules and regurgitate them onto paper, in the vague hopes of one day moving on to learning real math.  I could hear his disappointment in the system, how he wanted us to break away from restrictions.  "I want you guys to say to your teachers 'Hey teach! Is this math? When are we really gonna do math?'".  There is an eloquence in the roughness of his manner, and an elegance in the single-mindedness of his denunciation of what  can only be "the man". 
    Why have I not met another person like this?  A person that tells stories about halcyon days, a person that politely begs us to "please forgive his French," when he curses in front of us, a person whose watery blue eyes are mournful beneath black rimmed spectacles.  It is easy to envision him as a friend to Robert Plant, whom I have romanticized many times over (note: friends, stop misusing the word "romanticize").  This is no example of the idealized, perfect human, yet this is also no example of the product of complacency and mental stasis.  
     Nowhere shy of 6'5", lanky, and rather stoop-shouldered, he is at once an old man and an immortal man.  Immortal, I imagine, because his life had meaning; he was his own man, and fought to prove it.  He could have been stationed in Vietnam, had he enlisted as soon as he left high school.  He speaks with the authority of a person that has seen horror, and has learned to appreciate beauty.  He speaks of his travels and the books he has read, the things a lifetime of questioning has taught him.  
     On the surface, there is nothing remarkable about him.  A little too loud, a little too emphatic, yes, but nothing anyone else thought out of the ordinary.  But he is what I wish to be.  I want to be freed of the constraints of society, the way a man such as him must be.  I want to see the world through eyes none other than my own, and accept the horrors of a technologically changing world without swallowing the sugar-coating. 

“It`s not how old you are, it`s how you are old.”
― Jules Renard