EDITOR’S CORNER
You never know what turns and twists the conversation will take when you get together with people from your old high school class.
Six of us from The Great Sixty-Eight (Class of 1968) of Rockdale High School met a couple of weeks ago at a local restaurant.
We ended up talking about the strength of our reading glasses.
No, really. It went something like this:
“I had to go from a 1.25 to a 1.50”
“I know what you mean. I think I’m 1.75 in one eye and 1.50 in the other.”
“I had that Lasik operation and I still have to use reading glasses.”
“Can somebody tell me what it says on this menu!”
That last one was, of course, me.
I don’t think it’s fair to those of us who have been around the block a few times—slower, every time—that as we got older, everyone’s must-have technology shifted to these gadgets with tiny little screens we carry around in our pockets.
Maybe that’s the cause of what one classmate described by saying “do you have to do this?” and then squinting with a grimace that briefly transformed her face into Popeye.
So we compensate by getting larger and larger televisions.
Mine is approximately the size of Delaware.
That was another topic of our conversation. Television.
We all remembered when Rockdale had three channels, one in Austin, one in Waco and one in—well, Channel 6 was and is halfway between Temple and Waco.
We always just called it “Temple” to differentiate from the actual Waco station.
(There was also the Bryan station but, except for the local news, its programing was exactly the same as the one in Waco. I think most of us counted the Waco station and the Bryan satellite as the same one.)
That’s another topic which came floating up. There always seemed to be something to watch on those three stations.
Now we all have 200—I swear I got The Bagel Channel the other day—and there never seems to be anything on. We need those 1.75 glasses to read books instead.
It’s funny, at meetings like this, even though we have all lived full lives apart over the last half-century, so much of our conversation revolved around those long-ago times when we were in school together.
I’ve been to 45 Rockdale High School graduations and don’t remember a lot of things speakers have said over the years but I do remember one.
He told the graduates they may not have realized it, as they sat there wishing he would get through so they could grab their diplomas and get on with life, but that was the last time they would ever be together as a class.
And that meant something.
Yes, it did, and does. Only one class can be yours.
We were all touched that our 50th reunion last year was attended by a classmate who left Rockdale while in elementary school. Yet, after all those years, he still considers us as his class.
We all know, instinctively, that we are still connected after all those decades by our membership in that class. It’s ours.
All those years, and what they’ve done, is the reason why we are trying to get together more often.
We took a good look at our class roll after that 50th reunion and were saddened by how many of us are no longer here to attend any reunions.
Of course, this isn’t unique to the Class of 68. Every class has lost people near and dear to it. You don’t have to wait 50 years to come to that realization.
So, what are we doing, squinting at menus and talking about Ruth Kirk’s trigonometry class?
Napoleon is supposed to have said: “You cannot conquer a map.”
You can’t conquer a calendar, either.
We’re hoping for a draw. Just for now.
- Log in or Subscribe to post comments.