THE PAGES OF OUR LIVES

Rich Galen


Sap Alert: This past weekend marked the 50th
anniversary of the graduation from high
school of the class of 1964 from West Orange
(New Jersey) Mountain High. That's what this
column will be about.
If you are looking for an angry screed, hit the
key now and tune in later in the week when
I'm cranky again.
The thing about fifty years isn't that it goes by
so quickly when you're looking backwards,
and seems so impossibly far away when
you're looking ahead. That's true, but it's not
what is most important.
What I got to thinking about this past
weekend - the weekend of the inaccurately
named "50th Reunion" of my high school
graduating class - was about the inexorability
of the whole thing. (The inaccuracy occurs
because we have not had 50 reunions, it is
the reunion marking the 50th anniversary of
our graduation.)
From the moment of our birth one page
comes off the calendar of our lives every 24
hours (or, to keep the accuracy thing going,
23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.1 seconds).
Good times, bad times, smooth or rough,
happy or sad: One day, one page.
There are pages we would like to rip off, tear
into shreds, throw away from our lifetime
calendars in about 12 hours, and forget
about. Others, we would like to savor and
keep for weeks or months, and remember
forever.
Both are possible, but the will each use up the
same exact 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.1 seconds.
Not more. Not less.
Stipulating that graduation day for the West
Orange Mountain class of 1964 was on the
Summer Solstice of that year, June 21; 18,262
pages have fallen from the life calendars of
every one of the living 236 graduates. No
more. No less.
Gathering about half of them in the same
place at the same time allowed us to share the
vast variety of careers that a group of middle
class kids from Northern New Jersey have
been allowed to pursue during America's post
World War II go-go decades.
At this point in their lives many of my
classmates have retired and, being from New
Jersey, a significant number of them have
relocated to Florida. But there was a
California contingent, a classmate that came
from Finland and one from Israel. And one,
of course, from Alexandria, Virginia.
The last reunion I went to was our 42nd. At
the time I wondered (in a reply-all email)
why 42nd? "Why not 41st or 43rd," I wrote.
"Those are prime numbers. That's at least a
little amusing. What's funny about 42?"
One of my mates replied-all to my query with
this: "Because we're all turning sixty, you
moron."
I would have gotten to that if I'd thought
about it long enough.
Now, most of the class is 68 with a few of the
"children" including me, still 67.
When we were 60, we all looked like slightly
older versions of what we looked like when
we were 17 and 18. For the most part we
could look at one another and remember in a
glance who was who.
But, the pages of the calendar have taken
their toll on most of us physically over the
past eight years. Without name tags complete
with senior yearbook photos attached, it
would have been very difficult to answer the
question: "Do you remember who I am?"
Once I looked at the name and photo, each
68-year-old face resolved itself into the 18-
year-old person I remembered from high
school.
I also wondered what was going on fifty years
before we graduated, It was on June 28, 1914
(the 100th anniversary will be next Saturday)
when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was
assassinated sparking the Great War; a war
the U.S. would not enter for nearly three
more years. From July on, the rest of the year
is largely taken up by the news of European
nations choosing up sides.
Except for July 11, 1914 when Babe Ruth
made his major league debut with the Boston
Red Sox.
At our 50th reunion, the old flirtations
became new flirtations between slightly older
men and women. The high school feuds have
been either resolved, forgotten, or forgiven.
The talk had moved from who is secretly
dating whom, to what type of hearing aids we
favored and what brand of statin we are
taking.
The pages of our calendars will continue, God
willing, to drop away. Some day each of us
will reach the cardboard at the back and
we'll say goodbye.
But for this weekend, at least, a group of
senior citizens were young high school
graduates again and got to share their 18+
thousand calendar pages with one another
leaving with a new little twinkle in our
collective reading-glasses-needed eyes, the
better for having reconnected, and having
relived, the days that have gone by oh so
quickly.