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.
