So sometime around the first of June, it will have been sixty years since the class of fifty-nine, Staples High School, was handed their diplomas and sent on their way to try and change the world. If you had asked me then, where I would be in sixty years? I probably would have said, “Under the sod.” So many of my classmates are, but yet through the miracles of modern medicine, a little luck and some perseverance here I am. Still plugging away. We classmates, have lived long enough to become our parents and for many of us-- our grandparents. But I write this with some sense of forbearance, for we are at the point in our lives were the odds of going on are getting skinnier and we can no longer take the future for granted.
I have often wondered why after all of these years, I still remember the names of my grade school teachers. That is all except my second grade teacher. I do remember she was beautiful but I was seven, so we won’t talk about that anymore but my mind was developing wasn’t it? I do remember many of the teachers in junior and senior high too and our principal who I got to know up close and personal as she was quite the disciplinarian. Was it that the teachers made that big of an impression on us? I would like to think so. Think of all of the people we came in contact with out in the real world during those sixty years. Friends, fellow workers, neighbors, and yet none of them stick in your memory like those teachers did, at least not in mine.
I guess if I had one word to describe my feelings on that graduation day back then, it would have been bewildered. For some of my classmates it would be college, the service, or they had a job waiting. For me it was the later and I couldn’t wait to get started. Beyond that I had no idea where life would take me. That is until she came along and then they came along and my life changed immeasurably. New jobs and new adventures and with it yes, there were things in life I regretted doing, but her and the kids were never one of them. For me they were the purpose, in a purpose driven life. They were my biggest reason for living and some of the things I never accomplished myself, came to fruition through them.
Life for me was like peeling an onion. It simply got richer each time I revealed new layers, like promotions, retirements and grandkids but on the other hand the smaller the onion got, the faster it peeled away and then one day I was back to being alone again, remembering the past and realizing how dependent I had been on her and that partnership. Webster calls limbo “an uncertain period of waiting” and that is what it was. But then one day you wake up, shake your head and look at what little onion is left and say to yourself, there are things to be done, that I still need to do while I’m able to. For in the end when that onions all gone-- you don’t want to have wasted any of it. You only get one onion in life.
For now life is good again. The past is the past and yes there is no forgetting it but there is also no readily identifiable end to life as long as you find a reason in it for you. Then all you really need is faith in yourself and others, hope for a purpose in life and the love of those friends and family that got you here, where you are today.
