"You can always change your future but you can never change your past" my dad always says to me. My dad lived in Jacksonville Florida for most of his life with his three sisters. My dad struggled in school and nobody thought he’d ever amount to anything (except for his father), because all the rest of his family never graduated or ever done anything significant. When he graduated high school everybody was amazed, He went to the army and then to Morehouse Collage and then even farther to Meharry Medical School, which in his families eyes, was impossible. He says that the only person that ever believed in him was his dad and himself. Now he has everything he could have ever wished for. I only wish my life can play out as fortunate as his did, but where I think the first big change in my life took place was the summer of sixth grade.

It was the summer of sixth grade. As my mom is driving she asks me, "so where do you want to go to school next year?" " I don’t know," I told her, like I always do when I don’t feel like talking or really don’t know. "Siegel maybe" I said. She said "how about Webb." I didn’t know where Webb was or that it even existed, but I checked it out, and well, I ended up going to Webb. When I first came to Webb I was used to go to a public school. I made all A’s while barley even having to try, went to parties about twice a week, had lots of friends, and basically a perfect life for a ten year old kid. When I came to Webb all that had to change. I want to learn from the mistakes of others and not make the same mistakes they have made, and the biggest waste of a good chance to succeed in life was wasted when I witnessed the choices of my cousin Jamica.

"Change is, a thing that scares people, and that’s why they stay in one place and never help themselves. If they are at bottom, where they usually belong if they don’t want to change, then they need to change what they are doing and find a way to get to the top." My mom was talking on the telephone to my cousin Jamica about her chance of a lifetime she missed out on in Tennessee.

Jamica, who lived with me in my old house on Caselton Court in the sixth grade. She had come up from Jacksonville Florida, where none of her family had graduated from high school in sixty years. All of them were dropouts, none of them had graduated. Except for her uncle, Ramsey. My dad flew her on a plane up to Tennessee. When she came she had nothing with her except for some battered clothes and hope that someone would bail her out of her current situation, which was failing out of high school only to end up like the rest of her family. She had a chance to finish high school in Tennessee and my dad was even going to send her to the collage of her choice. But one Christmas she went back home and never came back. What kept her down in Jacksonville was her family that didn’t want her to change, and her unwillingness to change. I always thought that family was supposed to support you in all the decisions you make especially if they are for the better and will benefit someone in some way. I don’t know if they were afraid that she might change and become some stuck-up educated rich lady so they didn’t want her to do better. But she had a good chance in life and she got afraid because of change.

My dad went to the same school in Jacksonville as my cousin Jamica and made it through high school. He always tells me "I don’t know how I made it, but I did." He went through high school and collage and then medical school. A feat that none of his family had ever done...ever. He says it was hard work but it paid off because he was not going to make the exact same mistakes his family and previously made for generations. Now he has his own family and some money to do what he wants with, and all that his own family wouldn’t believe him to ever have. He changed the pattern and started a generation, my sister and I, of new minds that want to change and want to do better for the whole family.

I am in the tenth grade going to one of the best private schools in the country. I am doing fairly well and am looking to go to Morehouse Collage, the same collage the first Walker man has ever graduated from. I can look forward to the future that is ahead of me, and imagine what I’d be like, but I am able to look to the past behind me and learn from what previous people I know have done. I have to change the pattern of the ordinary like my dad did, but the first thing you must have is, the will to change.