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For the 50th anniversary of my high school graduation class, I (with assistance from classmate and longtime friend Dick Curry) wrote a piece called "Remember When...?" highlighting many of the aspects of my class's grade school and high school days. The piece concluded with this: "And remember when we finally went through Commencement exercises, sang 'Where the Blue Pacific Watches...' for the last time, stayed awake all night on a long train trip to Vancouver, then arrived home as day dawned on the start of our real lives?" The following poem is my attempt at a composite review of those "real lives."
Time-Sharing
At 70, you and your spouse debate:
When we disconnect and gasp our last
Do we go plot and casket or cremate?
Then, TiVo-like, you rewind your past.
Yesterday you cruise the Rhine, beach-comb
Fiji, restore a Ford, ace a par three,
Reunite with friends over latte foam,
Hang dry wall, pound nails out of charity
At Habitat for Humanity, and
With grandkids play catch, buy Happy Meals,
Crunch greasy popcorn during Spiderman,
And crawl along the floor racing Hot Wheels.
Medicare, Social Security, pension--
And so you retire, fearing unwonted
Vacant days undefined by work's tension,
Doubting leisure's blessing, by freedom daunted.
You transcend yourself through Christ or Om
And your trade, your craft, your canny skill,
Your steadied partner's steadying love, your home.
Paycheck no metric of your life, but still....
You'll be surpassed, you see, superceded.
Humbly you downsize. Smaller cars, smaller
Houses, smaller urges to be heeded.
Bric-a-brac's hauled off by a yard-sale caller.
The kids outgrow you, leave for college,
Job, or military, wired and wireless,
Aggressive in their digital knowledge.
You're proudly envious that they are tireless.
A big TV and a Lazy Boy,
Plopped into after dinner with a "Whew,"
Become your pals, enjoyed with sips of warm soy
Milk in a den with a limited view.
An eye roves, two or more hearts get scalded.
A second marriage and a promotion
Lessen the sense that you defaulted
But can't halt all inner commotion.
You stumble into your mid-life crisis,
Change jobs, buy a boat, grow a goatee
Or add piercings, worship Dionysus,
Run 10 Ks, ski, become a disco devotee.
You move from cramped rambler to split-level
With vista, play kids in HORSE, walk sidelines
At their soccer games, barbecue, revel
In camping trips, hand down guidelines.
Post-EHS, you heed your calling, train,
Prep, step into that career, and marry
The one who best blends into your grain.
A baby's birth makes you joyously wary.
Here the disc ends, at your start: high school
Graduation, 1957,
Core classes providing basic tools,
Classmates providing welcome leaven.
Five decades raced past, but not in a blur.
Your sins, your woes, your black-cat luck you rue
But assaying again those joys so pure
You long to continue, not to redo.
Fast-forwarding now, you two return
To your debate. You agree: it's cremate.
But with so much left for which we yearn,
Let's fob it off to a later date.
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