In the early 1980s I somehow fooled everyone.

In elementary school at the end of every school year, they'd pool us all together and talk to us about citizenship: what the word "citizen" means, what a citizen does, and what a citizen believes. They'd give us a week to think about it, and at the end of the week, we were all supposed to vote for who we thought was most deserving citizen in our grade.

The first year that I won, I thought it was pretty cool. At the end-of-year assembly in the auditorium, with the whole school and people's parents watching, they called me up on the stage (which, years later, would become my apartment) and presented me with the certificate above.

I was pretty stoked.

The next year, when the time came around to vote for Good Citizen again, I knew deep down that I was going to win again. Cockiness really isn't a mark of a good citizen. But I kept my hubris inside my own head.

A few days later, the school closed forever, and the next year I went to a new school where citizenship wasn't rewarded, which was good for me and my hubris because I kind of stopped being a good citizen.

But I wonder. If good citizenship had been rewarded at MacArthur/West Elementary, would my life be different today?

I guess I'll never know.