1965 tonight

I missed our 50th HS reunion a couple years back due to illness that worsens daily but keeps its coup de grace for a surprise.  I wrote my first remembrance of that 1965 evening on June 10, 2010.  This night back then, a dozen hours from now, we were handed a fake diploma and our names were called over the loud speaker in Central Stadium. So now it is over half a century later.  Why does half a century seem like so much longer than 50+ years?

A few dozen more people I knew and regarded highly have re-surfaced in the interval since 2010.  Some haven't been heard of in that half century but they are still there in the blue robes when last seen.  For the life of me I'm trying to think what we did after; being suddenly too old for Whites or the old haunts. I remember turning in our robes and getting our real diplomas in the girls gym with a few faculty there to wish us well but I don't think much went on as most of us - the males certainly - were looking at college or the draft and in particular, the selective service system.  Women were not likely to join the armed services - not because of any less or different love of country - but because it just was far more infrequent than it is now. They were not drafted in any event and President Johnson had upped the stakes in Viet Nam just a month before so it was nose to the grindstone.

I was a lifeguard that summer and when not in the guard chair, I was on the golf course and every evening I was playing trumpet someplace or another.  But that was the next 12 weeks and for whatever reason I don't remember that evening at all. There had to be a party or maybe all of us, feeling fully grown up, went to Debbie Teebles' house and made a french toast dinner and enjoyed each other one last time before we scattered to the four corners of the earth.