Every five years I get a new installment in the ongoing saga of my college class (it was Harvard 1965), and the Fourtieth Anniversary Report arrived yesterday. I've spent quite a few of the last 24 hours immersed in the lives of people I didn't know, or knew only very slightly, and I'm as much affected by the experience as I was by the seven previous iterations. This time around, the themes of retirement and grandchildren and parental death are much to the fore, with antiphonal threads of travel and health crises, and occasional notes of dissatisfaction with the directions in which the world is headed.
I am surprised to feel so connected with a group of people, my cohort, but at the same time so disconnected from nearly all of them as individuals. My freshman roommates are dead or vanished, and quite a few others I can recall pretty clearly are also gone. It seems that I didn't have many friends in the class, though there are a few I'd be delighted to see again. I'm amazed to find that two classmates live within 5 miles (and that they're recent transplants to Maine, as I am), but I'm not sure if hunting them up is likely to be a good idea, since what we share is granfalloonish membership in a fund-raising pool.
Wallace Shawn, yes that Wallace Shawn, wins my award for most eloquent entry, from which I'll quote a paragraph:
And today, still addicted to the fantasy that we're better than others and deserve a bit more, we accept with our well-known tight-lipped equanimity (occasionally broken by our well-known inaudible warblings of protest) all the blood spilled and the bones broken by our servants --Bush and the rest-- in their effort to preserve our well-merited position down to the last Reunion.