Class of 1963, 60th Reunion

 

On a stifling 100-degree Thursday, 24 August at 4 p.m., the 1963 graduating  class of Aquin High School convened at The Corner Taproom/Happy Joes in Cascade for a reunion. There was among the group widespread, wide-eyed—in some quarters even—outraged disbelief that we could actually be his old and out of school this long—60 years. Damn it? Are you kidding me? Us? No way!

            Well, come on, Honey. It is not as if our bards and poets didn’t warn us. The elegantly wise Leonard Cohen (RIP) who walked among us until a couple years back assured us: Many loved before us; I know we are not new. In city and in forest they smile like me and you…He-ey, that’s no way to say goodbye…as to say goodbye we all must sooner or later.  Many of us have all done our best to stave of thoughts of it, but as it nears, less successfully.

The year I lived in Israel, touring a kibbutz once I fell into a conversation with a four-year old boy (He and I had about a comparable level of Hebrew!) and he told me he wanted to be an Air Force pilot when he grew up. “Then,” he assured me, “I will be a great old man, like the one going there.” A withered, thin but still fierce old gentleman in a kippah (skullcap) dottered by as we spoke, “just like him,” the boy said. “Just like him!”

An impressive encounter with this incredibly young child who saw himself from such an early age in the ancient circle of Jewish life. So, growing up in a young (American) society with a 300-year old tradition, I was flabbergasted at a small boy from a society with a 6,000-old tradition.  We are what we are, and so the class of ’63, left the Corner singing as ever: Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end. We sing and dance forever and a day. We’d fight and never lose, oh those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end… Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end.

 Many thanks to Kay (Peiffer) Tauke for organizing the event and Monica (Noonan) Recker for the photos.