Instead of nostalgia, my own class of 1970 sends letters asking for money and notifying us that the college's students are smarter than ever... the wisdom of this is puzzling ... if they're so darn smart now, they must all be multi-millionaires... why are they asking me for money. I get it though ... our glory days consisted of the social club organizing off-campus events where we drank a lot of beer and then bought tickets for the privilege of smashing an old jalopy with sledge hammers. Not exactly something you want to bring up a in college's entreaty for moola.There aren't many drawbacks to being married to a beautiful and smart woman... too much junk mail from Berkeley and Yale asking for money ... a wife who doesn't quite understand lapses into silence at the dinner table ... trying to outdo each other with our war stories ... starting with the clinic in the Bridgeport ghetto and working her way through the ranks to run Arizona's biggest Medicaid health plan ... but when she gets too carried away with her triumphs over adversity, I drop the hammer: no one ever shot at you ... that's about it as far as drawbacks go.
Nostalgia's a dangerous narcotic. It let's me travel back and watch my daughter perform in her first play or sit with her and watch a cartoon show, The Rugrats, with a theme song I still treasure. Remembering slips into dangerous territory too often though ... searching for lost boys, too often in vain ... hunting for other boys, the enemy, in the darkness ... battles with steel monsters firing artillery shells, the explosions growing louder as the shells land closer and closer.When the visions interrupt dinner, humming the cartoon show tune seems to help ... but it leaves the wife puzzled at table ... and she asks: anybody home? Sorry, dear, I was just thinking about our Rugrats.
In the here and now we care deeply about our children ... there are lessons to be learned and we try to pass them on ... sometimes when I talk about the lessons, their eyes glaze over and I wonder what tune they're humming.
