When I was fourteen, Mom and Dad sent me to St. Joseph High School, the Catholic school up the hill from our place, housed in a 1950s-era tan brick building sometimes confused for a light industrial structure due to the surprisingly high smokestack of its old incinerator.

By high school, I had traded my oversized, thick glasses for contact lenses, but my eyesight was getting worse every year, smothering my childhood aspiration of becoming an astronaut or, at least, a pilot.

I kept up top grades, and by senior year, a flow of mailed college recruiting brochures accumulated into an avalanche on our dining room table.

Pete Buttigieg Quotes