Reunion Redux

Let me start by saying that we had a wonderful time at the reunion. (See my October 22nd blog entry.) We arrived in Boston on Friday afternoon at 4:00, and weren't in our rental car until nearly 5:00. Rush-hour traffic in Boston is legendary, but we ran into NO traffic from the airport, through the Sumner tunnel, onto Storrow Drive, across the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge (to M.I.T.), then along Memorial Drive to our Cambridge hotel. Yes, I said "NO traffic". I was stunned. We were in our hotel room at 5:30. By 6:30 we were having dinner at a chinese restaurant on Harvard Avenue in Allston, only about 100 feet from Brookline and very close to where our nephew lives.

On Saturday morning we visited our favorite jeweler in downtown Boston and hung out at Faneuil Hall Marketplace for a few hours. The reunion party was in Brookline on Saturday evening. There were about 200 people present, but some were unaccompanied so I estimate that there were 115 members of the BHS Class of '58. As I expected, I recognized almost nobody. Even after I read name tags I had a hard time seeing people's high school faces in their 67-68 year old mugs.

What was interesting was that for the most part, the people present looked healthy. Fifty years is a long time, and takes it's toll on hairlines, waistlines, and faces. Still, with few exceptions we looked good.

Of the people I mentioned in my pre-reunion blog, quite a few were not present. I missed Arlene Belkin Bernstein more than some of the others. I was very happy to see Berta Brooks Axelrad and meet her husband; I was happy to learn that my email to her did get through, but I'll use paper mail to contact her in the future.

Irene Yonkers Jennings denied that it was she that collided with me in the swimming pool in Jamaica. OK, Irene, I'll take your word for it, but someone from our class was in that pool! I've scanned the 1958 Murivian again, but I was so sure it was you, Irene, that I just can't come up with another name. For now, it's a mystery encounter.

It was good to see Gene Ring again, and John Stayn, and Alan Friedman and Mark Robinson and Martha Birnbaum, and David Shikes and Roberta Taymore Lander.

Adrianne and I sat at a table with June LoPorto Pickens (who still looks great) and the beautiful Mary Stewart Steele, who was the drum majorette for most of our high school days, along with Alan Friedman and his wife, Chelle.

Peter Goldfarb is retired. The website for his B&B in Mount Vernon, Washington, is still up, but he sold the business because he was tired of being "nice to people" all the time. Well, that's what he says, but I should add that he, like the rest of the class, is now 67 or 68. I won't speak for him, but I can't do what I used to be able to do. I'm very happy to be retired, not having to get up early to catch a train to work, not having to shovel snow or trudge from the parking lot at the train station up over the bridge and down to the inbound side of the track, and not having to dodge the puddles along Herald Street. Peter didn't have to deal with much snow in Mount Vernon, but I'm sure he's happy to have retired, too.

There were dozens of other Class of '58 grads present, and I can't list them all. It was great fun seeing them. It wasn't fun to read the In Memoriam page of the reunion yearbook. It's much longer than the list from 1998, and contains the names of a lot of people I knew and liked. The next reunion will probably be at 60 years, at which time we will be in our late 70s. I'm looking forward to it, but I plan to make contact with a few of my classmates in the interim.

While we were in Boston, we spent quite a bit of time with our nephew, Josh, who's a grad student at BU doing cancer research. We are very proud of Josh. He explains what he's doing very well, and considering how ignorant we are of the subject matter, that's saying something. Josh showed us his laboratory on Sunday, then joined us with my cousins Judy and Bob (Bob is the headmaster of Brookline High School!) for dinner at a great Afghanistan restaurant, then we saw him again for lunch on Monday before we set off for the airport, then home to West Palm Beach.

I’m getting ready to attend my first Brookline High School class of ’58 reunion, and I’ve written this in anticipation of the event. My brain can’t wrap itself around the concept of 50 years. I don’t really have any notion of how long that is. I’ve been married to the second Mrs. Yaffe, Adrianne, for over twenty years and I don’t remember not being married, so 50 years is way too long to try to grasp.

I look at my 1958 graduation picture and recognize myself only because that’s my name next to it. This is a color version of the Murivian picture. There are some pictures in family albums that look pretty similar, but there’s no way I would have been able to pick myself at 18 out of a line-up if I hadn’t seen those pictures. So I don’t expect to be able to identify very many of my classmates. Please wear your name tags prominently. Thanks.

I think I was the only member of my BHS class to go to Carnegie Tech, known since the mid-60s as Carnegie Mellon University. If anyone else went there with me, please pull me aside at the reunion and remind me quietly, or send email. I wasn’t the only person from the Greater Boston area in my Carnegie class, but I don’t remember anyone else from Brookline.

Since I haven’t attended any reunions before this I have had contact with almost none of my classmates since graduation. I can probably list the exceptions. I went through high school in a daze. I didn’t get into MIT because they deemed me not yet mature enough to attend. My dad disagreed. I probably shared his opinion, but I wasn’t heartbroken by their rejection. I got to go away to college, free from the relentless demands my dad was so good at making. Don’t get me wrong – I loved my dad. I miss him. He always wanted me to do my best. When I left BHS in 1958 I wasn’t ready to deliver my best. Carnegie Tech figured that out after a couple of years and suggested that I take a year off to get my head together. After 18 months I went back to Pittsburgh to finish my degree and begin grad school, having firmly established that computers were the direction I was going in.

During that 18 month hiatus I associated with a few of my BHS classmate friends. I only had a few BHS classmate friends, and most of them were away from Boston finishing their undergraduate education. I was pretty much a geek during my high school years. My friends were my AP Math classmates, my AP Chemistry classmates and my AP Physics classmates. Those of you who were in those classes will correctly remember that those classes all had the same dozen students.

Gene Ring went to Harvard, and I spent a little time hanging out with him in the early 60s while he was still an undergraduate and I was on hiatus. We had some fun, but he was still a student and I was working. I must have met and socialized with another classmate or two during those 18 months. I remember vaguely somebody in our class disparaging another classmate over his education and career choices. I don’t know if the person he named ever finished his degree – I think he did, but I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. I do know that he was considered one of the finest motorcycle mechanics in the Boston area in the early 60s. I respect accomplishment, so I respect the individual. I can’t remember who made the remarks. His face, his voice, and when and where we talked – that’s all gone now, expunged from my altogether too fragile memory.

Richard August, was it your guppies I tried to tend for a while? I apologize for screwing that up. …and I apologize if it was someone other than Richard August.

I returned to the Boston area in 1967 with my first wife and my son in tow. We wound up in Dedham and I worked along the 128 corridor, then eventually in Hopkinton before I took a downtown Boston high-tech job with Teradyne. They’ve moved out to Burlington now, but I’d retired in 2000, long before they did that. Until two or three years ago their facilities were in the South Station and Chinatown area, in space that is now far too valuable as residential space to be used for manufacturing.

During the late 60s Gene Ring and I with our wives got together on one or two occasions, and David Shikes spotted me in a restaurant one day quite by accident. David kept occasional contact with me for several years. He and I, with our wives, had fun one day exploring a long stretch of route 27 by car, much to the consternation of my first wife who never forgave me for wasting that entire afternoon. I didn’t think it was wasted. If nothing else I learned that route 27 is not the fastest way to get from Concord to Sharon.

I ran into Peter Gens on Federal Street in Boston one day in the late 70s, but he had no idea who I was and ran off before I could tell him. This is what I looked like in the 70s. Sorry I frightened you, Peter. It's no wonder you didn't want to stand around listening to my explanation of how we knew each other.

During the early 90’s I ran into Irene Yonkers Jennings. Well, actually I swam into her in the swimming pool at Dragon Bay in Port Antonio, Jamaica. We didn’t recognize each other right away, but we played the geography game until she realized that we’d had four years of homeroom together. I think Irene is the only BHS classmate who I’ve laid eyes on since I married my second wife, Adrianne. (Are you smiling, Irene?) I wasn’t as hirsuit in the 90s as I was in the 70s, but I did still have a beard (quite better trimmed than it was in the 70s) and I had some hair left then. It's almost all gone now.

I'm sure I ran into Roberta Taymore Lander now and again, especially during the late 60s and early 70s. Roberta and I spent a lot of time together during summers before we graduated because we summered within 100 yards of each other at a lake in New Hampshire. We hardly ever saw each other at BHS. (Some of my AP Math class may remember the lake, and the outing we had there. I can't remember what year that was - 1957)?

Is there anyone else? Hey, if you remember running into me, remind me please. A good deal of the last 50 years is now hopelessly muddled and lost, and I’d like to retrieve any pleasant memories.

…and speaking of pleasant memories, I want to mention some of the people I’ve thought about over the years. Martha Birnbaum has popped up in my “What ever happened to” list from time to time. I remember a statue dance we won together, or perhaps we were runners up. Dancing with Martha was one of the highlights of my geeky high school career, and Marty, I don't mean that as an insult. I didn't dance with many other people. You actually seemed to like dancing with me. Did I miss a cue? Well, no surprise. I missed a lot of cues those days.

I have thought occasionally of June LoPorto Pickens - I can't possibly be the only '58 graduate who has thought of June LoPorto now and again. During graduation week way back in 1958 I was gratified to learn that June actually knew me by name. I'd gone through high school thinking I was invisible to most of the "in" crowd.

I’ve made email contact with Arlene Belkin Bernstein a couple of times. I remember trying to reach Alan Friedman by email a long time ago; I finally succeeded just a few weeks ago. I’ve thought of John Stayn and Berta Brooks Axelrad – Berta, I tried to email you but have had no success. Mark Robinson, if you think I was talking about you earlier … yes, that was you, and I have wondered about you now and again. I look forward to seeing you. At the last I knew Peter Goldfarb was running a B&B in Mount Vernon, Washington. The web site is still up, but the listed prices are for the 2003/2004 season. Peter, what do you charge now? Adrianne and I spent a couple of summers in the Seattle area, but never got to Mount Vernon to check out the White Swan Guest House

I traveled a lot when I lived on Beacon Hill – that was during my bachelor years, after my first marriage ended and before life as I now know it began. During that period I flew somewhere in the world at least once every month and when I was home I used taxis a lot. It doesn’t pay to own a car when you live on Beacon Hill, work downtown, and travel a lot. I’m sure I’m not the only member of our class who has, or at one time had, a charge account with Boston Cab. The late Arnold Deluty owned several taxi medallions and also drove a cab. He occasionally picked me up at my Beacon Hill apartment to take me to the airport, or sometimes the one mile to my office on cold, rainy days. I was shocked to find his name on the ‘In Memoriam’ page of the 1998 reunion book.

Adrianne and I moved to Sharon in 1987. When I wasn't in Singapore, Seoul, or Munich I took the train to work, and walked from Back Bay station to Chinatown every morning and back every evening. I developed a strong dislike for February. After a snowstorm the sidewalk on Herald Street looked like the surface of the moon, and one had to carefully dodge past the big puddles in the street to avoid being splashed by passing cars and trucks. In 1994 I'd had it with the snow and cold so I took an intra-company opportunity to move to Austin, Texas for a few years, then in 1998 to Manassas, Virginia. When my job in Manassas reached the end of it’s run late in 1999 I retired and we moved to West Palm Beach. We spend summers away from the Florida heat, though. Adrianne's has lots of friends in New Jersey and we have grandchildren in Westchester County, New York, (as well as Seattle).

Adrianne and I spent a couple of summers in Seattle living in a travel trailer (long story – ask again later). We had the trailer moved (I never towed it anywhere) to New Jersey in 2005 to follow our Seattle grandchildren east (They're back in Seattle again!) and sold it toward the end of this last summer. It is possible for two people to live in less than 400 square feet day in and day out and not wind up committing mayhem. That we are still together attests to that. It helped that we only tried that for four months or so at a stretch. We will rent a house for the summer of 2009. I got tired of the repairs the trailer needed. A twelve year old trailer is like a twelve year old car. Something breaks every day, and some of the repairs take more than a day to fix. With each passing day I got further behind.

50 years! A lot has happened. Some of us will be together again in Brookline next weekend, and we are all quite a bit more seasoned than we were in 1958.. We are successes – all of us. Those few of us who don’t feel that they are successful probably won't be coming to the reunion. That’s not to say that everyone who doesn't show up is not successful - there are other reasons for missing the reunion. I’d have made it to the 40th reunion save for bad timing - I was just getting established in a new job and a new home. Somewhere between 1980, when I left my first wife, and 1986 when I met Adrianne, the daze that began before I ever entered Brookline High School lifted (It could, and did, take that long!) and I could finally focus on who I was, and I’m happy to say that I like what I found. I'm looking forward to introducing myself (and my wife, Adrianne) to my old friends.

Moscow - June 16th - Our last day in Russia

This was the last day of our river cruise. I left the ship right after breakfast for a tour of Star City (Russian: Звёздный Городок, Zvyozdny Gorodok), the Cosmonaut Training Center. The Russians are quite right to be proud of their training center. It is hardly modern, but it has the world’s largest indoor centrifuge – a mechanism used to test Cosmonaut candidates. The capsule in which the candidate sits can be tumbled and rotated while the entire centrifuge is rotating and creating an artificially high gravity. The centrifuge is capable of generating 40gs, or 40 times the force of gravity, but no human could withstand that force. Our guide, a former cosmonaut candidate (who didn’t make the cut) passed out every time he was in the centrifuge. Of course they knew right away that he’d passed out, what with 64 electrical sensors on his body and a “dead-man” switch in his hand. He believes that he has suffered long term effects resulting from some of the early medical testing.

We also saw the huge water tank in which Cosmonauts and Astronauts (yes, our Astronauts train at Star City too!) can practice spacewalks in weightless conditions. A life-size mockup of a piece of space equipment is assembled on a platform which can be lowered about 15 meters (47 feet) under water. The Astronauts and Cosmonauts are suited up and weighted to offset any buoyancy of the air in their suits and lowered into the tank so they can practice with the tools they might have to use in space.

Finally, we got to meet Sergei Zalyotin, Cosmonaut number 92. After their first successful flight, each cosmonaut is given a number. They’re up to over 100. Sergei addressed us first in English. Every Cosmonaut speaks some English, and every Astronaut speaks some Russian. But Sergei is more comfortable in his native tongue, and most of his presentation was in Russian and was translated for us.

We had lunch in the Star City cafeteria before we returned to the ship.

While I was at Star City, Adrianne went with a dozen or so other people and one of the Grand Circle Program Directors to Московская Хopaльнaя Cинaгoга, the Moscow Choral Synagogue. This is the main synagogue of Moscow and Russia. I wish I had been able to go on both tours. She had a wonderful time.

This was our final day. Adrianne did most of the packing that evening, and we put our bags outside the cabin door before midnight. We were up at 1:30 for breakfast and left for Domedovo Airport at 2:30. Our return flights to the US were eventless. We were back in our trailer, totally exhausted, before 2:00pm New York time.

Moscow, June 15th

At this point it’s all a jumble. It’s July 17th today and I’m trying to remember what happened on June 15th. I know that I didn’t go to the Central Museum of the Armed Forces, and I don’t remember the ship being particularly empty that morning, so I have to assume that I wasn’t the only one who didn’t find that intriguing. Later in the day I heard a few folks talking about meeting Russian WW2 veterans. After almost 50 years of cold war, it’s hard to remember that the Russians were our Allies against Hitler during WW2, but our own veterans certainly remembered that and enjoyed the war stories.

I also remember that Adrianne and I had decided before we left home that we would not go to the Moscow Circus performance. We can see the circus at home for far less money. Our shutterbug friends did go to the Moscow Circus, and despite the photography prohibition got quite a few nice pictures. (Also see Moscow Circus Part 2).

Moscow - June 14th

Our second day in Moscow was busy. Right after breakfast we left by bus for a tour inside the Kremlin. We left early to try to avoid long lines, and it worked. When we arrived at the entry gate we were perhaps 200 people from the door. We later saw lines out to the street at that same gate.

Inside the Kremlin we saw the Armoury Museum. The Armoury Museum is a museum of armor, including chain mail and the like, but also on display are all of the crowns and thrones that were used by Russian royalty, and their coaches, ceremonial robes, and gowns, and also the famous Faberge Eggs. No pictures are allowed inside the Kremlin but there are plenty of pictures of this museum on the internet. All I can say is that the Faberge Eggs are more fabulous in person than can be imagined from a photograph. I was unimpressed by the jeweled crowns, but that’s just me. I’m not particularly impressed by oval cut rubies and they seem to dominate the crowns. I’m more the “glitter” type.

After lunch at a small (and wonderful) local restaurant, we headed back to the ship. Our group shutterbug got into trouble by taking a picture near where we were waiting for our bus. It turned out we were in front of the Russian equivalent of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission headquarters and an angry guard confronted him, but our guide, Nadia, smoothed things over rather quickly.

That evening Adrianne and I went to the National Russian Show performed by a professional dance ensemble. The dances were stylized versions of classical Russian, Ukranian, Cossack, and other nationality native dances. It was a wonderful show and there wasn't an empty seat in the house. We were amused to hear other audience members whispering about the “Amerikanski’s” in the audience.

When the show was over we returned to the ship for a late dinner.

Moscow - June 13th

We arrived in Moscow late Friday morning, and busses were waiting to take us on a city tour, which began with a trip to Sparrow Hill, a scenic outlook south of the city looking north. The view of the city from this location is spectacular, and we had some time to enjoy it before boarding the busses to a metro station, and via metro heading to КРАСНАЯ ПЛОЩАДЬ, also known as Red Square. The first word, krasnaya, used to mean “beautiful” in Russian, but over several centuries time its meaning has shifted to “red”. So “Red Square” had nothing to do with the communism – it was Red Square long before the Russian Revolution.

Red Square is outside the walls of the Kremlin (“Fortress” in Russian. There was a kremlin in every city we visited on this cruise, including Uglich.), and the beautiful and very colorful St. Basil’s Cathedral, also called “The Cathedral of Intercession of the Virgin on the Moat” is at one end of the square. Foreign Television correspondents frequently stood outside St. Basil’s while reporting on activities at the Kremlin, leading many westerners to think that St. Basil’s WAS the Kremlin. Take my word for it. The Kremlin has a huge, thick, almost featureless, brick wall, and can be considered beautiful only if you are in thrall of huge, thick, almost featureless, brick walls. St. Basil’s Cathedral is gorgeous – at least to me.

Also within Red Square are several upscale department stores, and some of our group took time to check into what they had available. Adrianne and I stood outside St. Basil’s Cathedral watching people for about 40 minutes until the bus came to take us back to the ship and dinner. It was easy to identify most of the tourists by their cameras or headphones (apparently Grand Circle isn't the only tour company to have adopted this technology), and we often knew we were looking at a Muscovite woman by her high heeled shoes; that can't be easy on the cobblestones.

Uglich - June 12th

Our final river stop before Moscow was Uglich. It is a small town, but a stop on virtually every river cruise up and down the Volga-Baltic Waterway, so there is a significant tourist business here. Uglich has a history dating back to the early 10th century, and there was a significant fortress here. It’s a walking town. Our ship docked virtually in the center of town, so we walked through the inevitable gallery of vendors to the scenic spots in town. Uglich is home to the Chaika watch factory. I’d never heard of Chaika watches (Chaika is also the name of a Stalin-era Russian-built limousine), but apparently they are well respected. Many of our party did visit the watch factory, but I so rarely wear a watch the factory didn’t interest me a bit.