To The Luckiest Guy In The World

This is addressed to you, and you know who you are. You’re the one person in the world that does not have to worry about doing stupid things that would get anyone else hurt or killed. Things like talking on the phone or texting while driving, things like walking behind that car in the parking lot that’s starting to back up, things like pulling out from a side street into traffic without enough room because you know the other guy will slow down to let you in.

You go through life knowing that all the bad things happen to the other guy and not to you. You are blessed by the fact that you are too good, to careful, and to skilled to get hurt. If you do have an accident it has to be the other persons fault.

The trouble is that you’re not the only one who thinks they are so blessed. One of these days the two of you will meet and when you do chances are some innocent bystander will get hurt. I just hope that it is not me or someone I know.

Reunions

Having had a week to think about it I thought I should put down a few thoughts about class reunions. Last week, after forty years I met with my fellow alumni for the reunion of the Benzie Central High School class of 1969.

First of all I only recognized one or two people. Don’t get me wrong I remembered them, I just didn’t recognize them. Time it seems changes us all. Hair turns gray, waistlines expand, hair lines recede, and everyone is forty years older.

Time brings us together. It would seem that as we age differences in personality and lifestyle that seem so important forty years ago no longer mater. They have been erased by a lifetime of shared experiences. We have all watched as the world has changed and dealing with that change has blurred the lines between the jocks, band kids, and the kids who were in shop class. It makes you realize that in so many ways we are the same.

We may not remember things exactly the same way, but the memories we share are the same. We may not agree on how things happened, but we agree that they did and that’s all that matters. Lets jest hope that next time we can still remember at all.

As it is I’m looking forward to next time and I’ll see you in five more years.

Walter Cronkite

A great man has passed away.

If you were born in the eighties you may wonder who he is, but the rest of us know. At a time before cable TV and computers in your pocket when all we had was the radio and three channels on TV he came into our homes each night and told us what was happening in our world. He was there when our world was shattered in Dallas in 1963 and helped us make sense of the war in Vet Nam. He told us about every thing good or bad that happened and somehow made us feel that things would be alright and life would go on. He made us realize that it was ok to cry over the bad things and life would go on.

He was always there to reassure us as he brought us the news and as a result he became part of our memory of each event. The moon landing, the Cuban missile crises, J.F. K.’s death, he was a part of them all and he helped shape the way we remember them.

Good by Mr. Cronkite you will be missed.