I just learned that a high school friend, Ramiro Miranda passed away a week before last Christmas.
One of the very luckiest events of my teen aged years was the honor and privilege of getting to know and be around him. A bureaucratic accident caused by the similarity in our names.
Ramiro was a very good man who achieved his life goal of becoming a doctor. A quite accomplished orthopedic surgeon as I’ve learned. I was maybe his only “bad” friend in that once in a while as teenagers we’d go out and attempt to recruit a grown up to buy beer for us. (occasionally we were even successful…) So if you can imagine the days when it was “normal” for two teenaged boys to drink beer and drive around at night (as in “gee what could go wrong…?”) yeah, that was (very occasionally) us.
He usually wasn’t available for this and there was never any doubt as to WHY he was unavailable. Ramiro was a voracious and unapologetic student intent upon achieving his goal of becoming a doctor. These days a lot of smoke is blown about so called “rugged individualism.” For an extra 50 bucks you can make it official with a rugged individual neck tattoo. Well, for whatever it might be worth to anyone it’s fair to say Ramiro was the first REAL rugged individual I’d ever met. (no tattoo required…)
If you were there you know. Norwalk in the 60’s wasn’t a “Hell” More like benevolent mediocrity. We were pretty much coddled academically for a lot of reasons but I don’t want to digress here, only point out that Ramiro set his own academic standards and developed on his own the motivation and discipline necessary to achieve his goals. Were there teachers in Ramiro’s life that inspired him? I don’t know. I guess that wasn’t something we talked about much but one thing I could see even then was that there were PLENTY of teachers who were inspired BY him.
I remember us playing tennis and you taking your beatings like a dutiful friend and yes Ramiro, I remember the day Crockett pulled ME out and put YOU into a basketball game at a critical moment and the grin you shot me on the way in. (didn’t blame you a bit…) I’ve no idea if anyone will read this but if anyone does and they remember Ramiro I would dearly love to learn something about him that I didn’t know. I never knew a thing about his family. Was he raised by a single mom like me or was his dad around? Did he have brothers and sisters? I’m embarrassed and sad to realize if I ever asked, I don’t remember.. What I know (now) is that his friendship was one of the things that got me and perhaps a few others through those times. Rest in Peace Doctor Ramiro Miranda. – RM
