You should be ashamed

No doubt the new kid would have fit in with some clique in a public school, but his parents - who had bought an old rooming house near the University campus - had the temerity to enroll him in the University's lab school where the classes were tiny and there were only two cliques:  "In" and "Out."

Jack Thornton wasn't an attractive kid. He galumphed into our tightly knit little 9^th grade class with a loose-limbed gait, funny clothes, and a bad haircut. Most of his new class had been together since kindergarten and I doubt any of us expected the new kid to make it through the  semester. Even the new University president's kids had left to enroll in public schools after nine painful months.

It wasn't physical intimidation that sent them running, it was verbal. Most of the students were armed with a biting wit and attitude forged in homes where the alpha parent's mastery of verbal combat had earned the title tenured professor, or a parent whose livelihood depended on exercising power over others.
Jack obviously didn't fit the mold. In addition to his unconventional appearance, his fingernails were dirty because he spent his spare time working on cars and motorcycles, and his idea of humor was to make rude noises. He was a whiz at armpit farts and he could make a basso profundo foghorn noise that seemed to resonate in his lower intestine.

During the first week of school he showed up looking like a bad imitation of a 1950's beatnik in black jeans and a black T-shirt; so some of the guys started calling him "Dad" (as in Daddy-O, the then-passe beatnik version of Dude).Jack embraced the nickname as a term of endearment.

Another day he showed up  wearing huge, scuffed motorcycle boots that hadn't been fashionable around campus since . . .  ever. One of the rich kids walked by with a bucket full of sarcasm and said,  "Nice boots."
"If you think these are wild," Jack replied, "wait until you see what I'm wearing tomorrow!" The kid was clueless.

After someone commented on his lousy haircut, he said, "My dad cuts it. He has to catch me and tie me to the chair before he does it." And he laughed.

It turned out that trying to insult Jack was futile. He would not accept a snarky remark as an insult.
And to the confusion of the polished round pegs who claimed ownership of the lab school's academically engineered round holes, Jack looked like and acted like a square peg; but  somehow he began to fit without changing who he was - like he was made of Silly Putty ^TM instead of stone.
It wasn't long until kids gave up trying to embarrass him and started calling for a Jack Thorton foghorn to punctuate a bad joke,  seeking his counsel about car problems, and - for a piece of locker room performance art - one of theintellectuals would strike a match to light a Jack Thornton fart.

Within a few weeks Jack had woven himself into the fabric of our class so seamlessly that it seemed like he'd always been there. He was, of course, human. He had frustrations and a few shouting matches and was wounded - as were we all at that age -  by incomprehensible disappointments in adolescent romance.
But he became a role model for some of us who entered our teens feeling the pressure to go against our own nature to be like the popular kids. He made us realize that people can't laugh at you if you are laughing too, and he taught us that we need not be embarrassed by things that are not important or things about ourselves that we can't change. Save your rage for things where it might make a difference.

Make fun of my mother and you've got a fight on your hands. Make fun of my shoes? Well, the fact is, no one cares what kind of shoes you are wearing when you cross the finish line.