Classmates, reunions and Hard Truths.

This is not going to be pleasant reading. If you do get through it I’ll have some comforting words for you.
I’ll be 76 next month. Same day every year, May 8th. It won’t be as joyous as May 8, 1945 when I celebrated both my 10th birthday and VE Day riding around Edmonton Alberta in an open car until way past my bedtime. As Scott Fitzgerald said, “the greatest thing life can give you is youth”.
I was at a reunion last week of staffers (not me) who worked together on the UC Berkeley Daily Cal newspaper in the 1950’s. They’re still a pretty spirited lot, have all their marbles, are courageous but are coming to the last chapter of the story. One has had a stroke and walks with a cane, one is recovering from cancer and has her head covered with a cap, the rest are balding, gray haired, widows or widowers. My zaftig wife is one of them but she still has hair the color of Rita Hayworth’s.
When Casey Stengel was showing his young outfielders how to play the ball off the fences one of them said, “How does an old guy like you know this stuff?” and Casey replied, “Jeez kid, I wasn’t born this age”. None of us were.
I have a high school reunion next month in Vancouver but won’t be going. It’s too far and too depressing. My best friend from the sixth grade and President of the Class didn’t even make it to the 25th reunion. He had drowned in his thirties. At the 55th I asked my “two kiss” girlfriend” of my Senior year if her feckless, divorced husband was still around and she just pointed up to the sky, the shortest, sweetest obit I’ve ever seen.
The giant scythe keeps mowing us down with a bumper crop on the horizon. But, as Jean-Luc Picard says, “It’s a condition of our existence”. However, what is the quality of our existence these days anyway? Recession, wars, poverty, terror, Newt Gingrich. “People in nursing homes die watching late-night television,” Garrison Keillor said, “ and if I were one of them I’d be grateful when the darkness descends”.
Orwell advised his readers to face the hard truth that we are all forgotten in one generation and in two no one will ever know we had ever lived.
So, here’s my advice to keep the ball rolling, no matter what age you are: read more poetry, more Hagar The Horrible, go to the movies but only if it’s a Pixar film, don’t waste time with Oprah or the evening news, compliment three people every day, including strangers. As Yogi Berra says, “It isn’t over till it’s over”. If this has left you depressed get out your DVD of “Singin’ in the Rain” or put on the Hi Lo’s cheerful version of “Life is just a bowl of cherries” with the life-reinforcing chorus: “Live and laugh at it all, you know, like Ha-Ha, Ha-Ha, Ha-Ha”.