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Forty years ago today, the Transylvania University Class of 1986 was released into the world, ready (or otherwise) to face the rest of their lives head-on. I wrote about that weekend a few years ago, so I’m not descending into detail about that here. A couple of pictures from the day, one each taken by my friend Suzanne and my mother, won’t hurt, though. |
| James in the center, with various friends after the ceremony. |
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| James, Mark H, Cathy, and I are clearly looking elsewhere. Mark’s brother Paul is making a cameo. |
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Four weekends ago, a few old friends and I returned to Transy for Alumni Weekend. I served on the planning committee for my class’s 40th celebration for the past six months, helping select a location for the Friday evening class gathering and encouraging classmates to consider traveling to Lexington. Many—but not all, alas—of the folks I most wanted to see were able to come. |
The Friday night affair, held in a bar in Lexington’s revitalized warehouse district, was decently well attended, with around twenty ’86-ers (and several spouses) present. We were able to use their back room, and the TU Alumni Office provided some appetizers to go with the stuff on tap. It was a fun couple of hours—while I didn’t chat with everyone present, I managed to mingle plenty. One conversation I need to follow-up on somehow: a classmate’s wife, who was a member of our class of ’88, mentioned a book about evaluating what one values most as retirement approaches—what info she relayed to me about title/author slipped away almost immediately. |
Saturday was mostly sunny and pleasant, a high in the low 70s. I drove the dozen miles to campus in the morning to attend a convocation where alums from classes ending in 1 or 6 were recognized for achievement in their careers or service to the university. Afterward, I moseyed over to the nearby plaza in the center of the academic side of campus, to meet up with three friends who hadn’t been at the event the night before. We’d be taking a campus tour, investigating what had changed—and what hadn’t—since our reunion ten years prior. |
Angela and Michaela arrived a few minutes after I did (Cathy would show just before we were to start out). The tour guide, a current student more used to shepherding prospective students and their families, made small talk with the fifteen or so folks assembled. Upon finding out the three of us were from the same class, she asked, “Oh, did you know each other back then?” Angela, ever with the sharp wit, didn’t hesitate: “Too well, in some cases.” (I should mention at this point that Angela and I dated for over a year during our freshman and sophomore years.) I laughed and responded, “That’s fair.” The guide had no clue, of course. |
Following the tour, a couple others, Leah and Dianne, caught up with the four of us to walk a few blocks for lunch with Dave Shannon, a favorite professor to many of us and my primary math mentor. We ate outside on a covered patio, which allowed us to continue conversing well after the restaurant closed at 3:00. |
Martha joined in time for the all-classes dinner, held under a large tent pitched in the lawn in front of Old Morrison, campus administration building and Lexington landmark. An official class picture, with many fewer people on hand than the night before, was taken on the steps of Old Morrison before we got our food. Friends Jim and Kevin were now present as well. Martha, the only spouse/significant other there, took a slew of pix on everyone’s phones not long before a band led by a late 90s alum started playing. Can you pick out the four of us that are in the larger group picture above? |
| Front: Michaela, Angela, Kevin. Back: Cathy, Jim, yours truly, Leah. Dianne had gone home mid-afternoon and re-joined us after the band fired up. |
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The band was fine but much too loud for that enclosed space, so we all wound up walking around for a while, winding up back at the plaza behind Old Morrison. We talked, collectively and in smaller groups, until well after the band had fulfilled its contractual obligations and darkness had fallen. After a few false starts, the group finally broke up to go its separate ways. I would have enjoyed greater opportunity for extended one-on-one conversations, but it was a very good day. |
I returned on Sunday afternoon for a joint alumni band/alumni choir concert. Fun shows, but even better was getting to see Dottie and Ron, alums from the 70s who had served as leaders of the church youth group I belonged to in HS, and Kathy Jo, a friend from a year behind me (Dottie and Kathy Jo both sang with the alumni choir). It occurs to me as I write this that the concerts took place in the auditorium where my graduation ceremony had been held. Afterward, it was back home to face the reality of the final two weeks of classes in my 34th year at Georgetown. |
One of the phrases I’ve come to use in conversation in recent years is, “I/We/You lived to tell,” naturally in reference to making it through some moderately strenuous event or stressful stretch of life. I can’t recall the exact context now, but I did wheel it out at one point on the Saturday night of the reunion. It’s fair to say there’s a direct line from the title of Madonna’s spring ’86 hit song to those moments when I employ the phrase, even if it’s always used in the past tense. |
Those of us who gathered last month have indeed lived to tell each other about our successes and trials forty years on, to share shards of memories from the days when we huddled in the same two-square-block area just north of downtown Lexington. But I’m also thinking today about some of the folks who unfortunately, tragically aren’t still here. Bob, a commuter and fellow trombone player who regularly wore a Stetson and cowboy boots to wind ensemble practice and performances. John, a fellow CS major who married college sweetheart Bonnie in the Old Morrison chapel mere weeks before graduation and settled with their two kids thirty miles away. And James, of course, my roommate, in many ways the connective tissue for this group of friends. Forty years is forever, and yet almost no time at all. |
Starting maybe ten days before, I prepped for the reunion weekend by tuning my car radio to SiriusXM’s 80sOn8 channel. Granted, only about 40% of what they play comes from my college years, but tunes from that fall ’82-summer ’86 period to a large extent comprise the heart and soul of what’s become the 80s canon. So many of them connect me to scenes and events from those days; on the way to the Friday class gathering, I told Martha (when applicable) the semester the songs being spun were popular. |
The Premiere 80s AT40 offering for the weekend following the reunion was the 5/3/86 show. As it ran, I noted those songs I’d heard a week prior on my trips back and forth between home and Transy: “Manic Monday,” “Your Love,” “Kiss,” and last of all, returning from the Sunday concert, “Live to Tell.” On the show it was at #14 and heading for the top, ascending there two weeks after our commencement. It’s a top five Madonna song in my estimation. |
I know where beauty lives—at least some of it. |
It’s in the memories we make with folks who enter our lives through happenstance, like independently electing to attend the same college. It’s in learning after more than four decades there was someone else who loved rooting through their father’s issues of Stereo Review back in high school. It’s in taking the time on a Sunday to enjoy an arrangement for three saxophones of a baroque sonata and many beautiful choral pieces. It’s in having some of your past huge mistakes, if not forgiven, perhaps at least discounted due to your youth and immaturity at the time. |
Later that Sunday afternoon, Angela texted a picture to Michaela, Cathy, and me from the Lexington airport. It was of a card she’d seen in the gift shop there, a quote from (the very end of, if I recall correctly) A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh. |
“We’ll be friends forever, won’t we, Pooh?” asked Piglet. “Even longer,” Pooh answered. |
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