Happy Holidays

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Growing up in the winters of western New York is good practice if your desire is to be reincarnated as a Santa in a snow globe.

I was there for work, and family, and also especially to meet some of of my old classmates and teammates from some 40 plus years ago, survivors of an all boys Jesuit prep school 1961-65.

It was fabulous, seeing so many of them again. It was exactly as if I had wandered back to 1965 in the Senior Hall, and we were all wearing Halloween outfits of what we might look like at the turn of 2010.

Our charismatic and colorful host, John B, was an Orson Wells kind of guy. He lives with his family in a Dickensian manse swallowed in snow and girded with lights, having designed a richly populated life from travel and music. Mike G was there, every bit as wiry, upbeat and energetic as I remembered him. Dick L. too: he was the energy and drive behind the getting together, which began as an intimate clack of classmates pulled together by the tragedy of Tony L, and his disastrous spectacular rise and possibly fatal fall.

Mike S., by far the best athlete in the school, and one of the best in the school's history was there, looking fit enough to put on some football pads and bust another 90 yard run. Mike had a successful business career, retired, was helping out a buddy's business by acting as a security guard. It turns out that he would be working a baskeball game between our school and our formerly most bitter rival.

Mike S was the kind of athlete who could bring 15,000 people to their feet, roaring, marveling over a run he had made in football or a dunk he had scored in basketball. I had an image of him at the basketball game now, a grey haired sixty something guy in a security jacket (a sixty something guy that no one would think of messing with), completely anonymous to a crowd that, some forty years ago, would have worshipped his every move.

Life's sly silent ironies, eh Juan?

Jimmy C. (AKA the "Twister") was there, and it did my heart good to see him after all these years. I recalled a story about when the Twister and a couple other of us were in a park, sitting on a park bench, when a ranger came up and said, "Boys, you don't sit on the table at your homes, do you?."

"Sir," said the Twister, "we don't have picnic tables in our house."
But Jimmy didn't remember the story happening.

(To be continued...)

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Photos

Back yard
Most beautiful when a cardinal visits in the snow.