What is This, Which Morning Sunlight….

What is this, which morning sunlight
Guilds with golden beams?
‘Tis our Upper Darby High School,
Castle of our dreams.

So goes the first eight bars of the Upper Darby High School Alma Mater. Now I don’t know that my high school was the castle of my dreams, or that of my 650 or so co-graduates of the class of 1969. But we did get a very good education there, and I generally remember it fondly – mostly. But “castle of our fond and a few not so fond memories” is not quite as poetic, is it? In any event, this past weekend, I journeyed to Philadelphia for my 40th reunion, a little trip down memory lane. We had only about 80 people show up, and several people I really wanted to see in particular were not there, but it was still a fun reunion and a fun weekend in the City of Brotherly Love.

It is amazing to look at my yearbook photo from way back when, and realize that most of my life was still ahead of me. Even though things have not always turned out as I would have hoped or planned back in 1969, it has been a full life. And the 40 years seems to have gone by in the blink of an eye. If you are a young 20 or 30 something-year-old, those years will fly by for you as well. Trust me on this one! So remember to live your life fully and to live each day.

In high school, I guess I would have been considered a geek, although we didn’t have that term that I recall. I was a good student, but not an exceptional one. I was a crummy athlete, which is one reason why doing marathons this late in life has been so surprising. I wanted to go to the Naval Academy, although even had my grades been good enough, my poor eyesight doomed any realistic chance of that. But even so, the desire to go to Annapolis, and just the way I was raised, made me a real “straight arrow” in high school. I never got in trouble, didn’t drink or smoke – much less use drugs – and generally minded my own business and treated people politely. The few times I should have gotten in trouble, I had such a spotless reputation that the Dean of Boys let me off the hook.

I’m sure that when I was 18 I thought I knew more than I really did. That is one thing about aging – the more you learn, the more you realize you do not know. At 18, so much of my life was still ahead of me – college, grad school, marriage, fatherhood, career, developing as a person, becoming a grandpa, surviving cancer, becoming a marathoner. So much has happened in the last 40 years, both in my life and in the world. I am not likely to live another 40 years, although 30 seems possible and 20 seems likely. I wonder what those years will bring? At some point though, it will not be morning sunlight, but the evening setting sun that guilds the castle of my dreams.