Reprinted with Permission by Currents Magazine | JAN 2025 | Cornelius, NC

The picture belowis from my junior year and the Semmes High School Camellia yearbook. I chose it because, as much as anything in this piece, it represented my best days ahead. I played a lot as a junior but didn’t start until the end of the season. Semmes High School was a country school. The yearbook was named Camellia because of the many nurseries in the small town of Semmes and the number of camellias they exported to Mobile and beyond. I would graduate from Semmes in June 1965 and make my way to Auburn, from which I would earn a bachelor’s in education in 1969 and an Ed.D. in Educational Leadership in 1985. The years at Semmes and Auburn were good. I learned to be a decent student and sometimes a good one. My education in the often-maligned Alabama public school system led me to serve in many roles for 50 years, also in public education, from middle school to Associate Professor Emeritus of Educational Leadership at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. 

When I look at this old picture, I tend to focus on the number 22 and how skinny I was! Oh, to have those days back again. I wore that number for JV Basketball, Varsity Basketball, and Varsity Baseball. I don’t know why I selected that number, but its unique symmetry began to appear in my life one night during my senior season. A date, not the game, is etched in my psyche. I wore my number on February 2 in 1964 — 2-2. The highest point total I ever achieved was—you guessed it—22, but it didn’t stop there. My wife and I were married on December 22, 1969. Actually, I just recently realized that it started with my mother. She was born on January 22, 1922. Thanks, Mom!

I was short and quick. Not good enough for the next level. However, that picture and those days are as fresh as when they occurred at Semmes High School, in its classrooms, courts, and diamonds, where a country boy began a string of best days ahead.

My Best Days are Ahead

By Mickey Dunaway

“Lord, I’m much too young to feel this damn old.”  –  Garth Brooks.

Garth wrote and sang those words on his debut album in March 1989. With apologies to Garth Brooks, my version is titled “I’m Much Too Old to Feel this Damn Young.” With 79 years in the rearview mirror of my life, I have every reason to feel old like Garth. But I have never given in to that attitude. 

Heck, I changed jobs at 58, leaving a school district superintendency in Indiana for a professorship at UNCC. I taught master’s and doctoral students for 14 years until I retired in 2018. I have faith that 2026 and beyond will bring more great days yet to come. 

Better days ahead is not a 2026 New Year’s Resolution—I don’t trust in New Year’s resolutions. I have seen enough of them ending up in the trash heap to recognize them for what they really are: unacceptable creations of hope.

I don’t know who said, “Hope is not a strategy,” but it is one of the great truths of societies and individuals. Two thousand twenty-six resolutions are written with the sure certainty that there is almost no chance they will see the light of day of February 2026, much less in January 2027.

Conversely, honesty, faith, and vision—those are different things altogether. Honesty is the basis of all positive values. Vision is where honesty and preparation meet new opportunities. Faith is the foundation of integrity. Integrity occurs when one’s patterns of behavior clearly demonstrate honesty, faith, and vision in action. 

As I have written here before, this time last year, my wife and I began to explore the world of fly fishing the mountain streams of North Carolina for rainbow, brown, and brook trout. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that decision was to become the kernel of our “better days ahead.”

I have been retired long enough now to recognize a retreat into the silliness of a bucket list. First, I will never have the greenbacks to make it happen. Second, a bucket list can never be as meaningful as where one has already been or as long-lasting as days spent learning a challenging new set of skills and finding ways to cause those new skills, not to be hoped-for, but achievements that teach my grandchildren that learning never stops if powered by honesty, faith, and vision. 

I close with the last two lines of a duet by country singers Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge. And let it always be said that I take my inspirations wherever I can find them!

Yes, I’d rather be sorry for something I’ve done

Than for something that I didn’t do.

-Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge

I’d Rather Be Sorry, 1974