I don't have everyone's birthday set on my calendar but I have some. One of those is an old Istrouma High School classmate named Nelson. When I think of Nelson, I see this fresh faced kid who always seemed to smile at me - but then I think he smiled at us all. There are dozens of friends from those years that I would love to send birthday greetings to but after 65 years, and a couple of thousand miles connections grow corroded and most of the time slip into that memory "cloud" where all memory seems fixed in time.
Nelson used to publish a web site on which he posted pictures of a regular luncheon of our class. That was painfully informative. I would look at those faces and then compare what I was seeing with what I remembered. Have I mentioned "painfully informative"? I can remember finding an old photo of myself taken my Mr. Handly (I think that's the spelling), our physics teacher, and held it up beside my face as I stood in front of the bathroom mirror. Painfully informative just about covers the wave of emotion that swept over me at the time. That wrinkled effigy staring back at me couldn't possibly be me - could it? Uh huh, it could. Being older is mostly about such reality checking. It ain't what it was and it will never be that way again. After that it's much easier.
Nelson responded to my birthday greeting and told me of a bi-monthly meeting of half dozen of our classmates who presented him with a slice of cake and a candle at the restaurant. His comment about listening to a table full of geezers singing "Happy Birthday" was, again, instructive. I would give a lot to have been there.
Then I think: what would we all talk about. Those guys have remained in the home town for their entire octogenarian lives. They have volumes to talk about. What I have in common with them are a few years that ended 65 years ago. There is one thing you can say about memory that old: it's cloudy at best and no two people remember it the same way. Yet, I'd still love to hang out at one of those breakfast meetings. At best, it would be a happy reunion. Then at the worst, there really might not be anything to talk about.
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