I think Anthony may have tapped into one of life's core obstacles that hamstrings so many young people (as well as some old). It seems there is more of it going on these days, but perhaps it has always been around but has never been given voice in the past. Heard!

Of course, he didn't land on this epiphany as it was happening but on the backside. It is one of those cases when you are shown the solution it looks oh-so obvious. But before you hear the resolution, it is just another one of those things that sit in our mental (and emotional) blind spots. We explain away so many of these matters but our explanations are a little off the mark since we don't really know what the actual mark is.

Before I start, I need to say that Anthony is not telling this. This is me, his father, retelling his story as it was "reported" to me through our conversations as he wended his way through this stretch of adolescence. Anthony was halfway through middle school when Covid hit. For him, everything was normal on the Friday before his seventh-grade spring break. At that point in time, no one could have predicted that, aside from one day of standardized testing a year later, he would never set foot in his middle school again. Also unbeknownst to everyone who was not Anthony, he was working through some of his own stuff during that homebound year and a half.

Anthony would be the first to admit that he could be a bit of an annoying little cuss when young. He came to this conclusion through a few channels. Self-reflection, being related to Bella, observation, oh, and there was the time a classmate got in his face and told him, in impressively concise language, that he was an annoying little cuss. That last one spat in his face from another face inches away, might have landed with a bit more impact than the others.

So, as a reasonably bright fellow who is ever-receptive to new information, Anthony suddenly found himself with eighteen months of time to process a number of confused feelings he was having about, well, namely, who he was. It occurred to him that if he didn't want to continue being this thing it seemed he had become, he needed another option. And being confined to a room day and night with just one other person, his brother (who doubles as his best friend) to interact with, he needed a larger sample size. Enter the world of film. Here, there were zillions, if not scillions, of easily consumable examples of people and behavior, good and bad, that he could study from the comfort of his Covid bunker.

So he jumped in and watched and noted and watched some more and refined his vision and adjusted his perceptions on what it is to be good and liked and successful and reliable, as well as what it is to be annoying and irksome and unhelpful. Then, he began high school. And he began high school at a new school in a new school district where his mother works and where he knew no one, and no one, his mother and a few family friends aside, knew him. Anthony used this unique reset as a live-fire way to try out all that he learned from his film study.

I've spoken before about what it's like walking around with Marty and her celebrity status at that school, given she is one of the students' favorite teachers. Now that Anthony has two years under his belt at the school, moving through the halls, being Anthony's, ahem, Tony's father, is not immensely different. You hear zealous and animated calls of 'TONY!' at just about every turn. The fact is, I don't even have to be with Tony to see the Tony-effect as many report we look very much alike, so I've been stopped plenty of times and asked if I'm Tony's dad. When I say I am, what I often hear next is an enthusiastic "I LOVE TONY!"--not exactly the marker of an annoying little cuss.

When he was a sophomore and hanging out at an all-night diner with some people after a dance, he shared his re-definition project with the table. Anthony has definitely worked on his story-telling game too and can hold his own with just about anyone when it comes to owning a story or small group of people. So he regaled the late-night crowd with his rebirth saga, and when he was done, one of the girls present was on the yearbook staff and told him that that should go in the yearbook. And in the yearbook it went, granted without all the unique flourish and waving hands Anfer can put on the retelling.

So, in his journey, Anthony might tell you he still doesn't know exactly who he is meant to be, but I know he is way further down that path of discovery than many of us were when we were sixteen.