My high school classmates Pam and Ina invited us to a small reunion of fellow graduates, most of whom I have known since sixth grade. Traffic was light, and the 39-mile drive from Foster City to Oakland took one hour, not bad for a Sunday.
We went around the room compressing the last 55 years into a three-minute summary, the maximum time our spouses would tolerate, when the bell rung. The discussion leader, Dianne, was a nice girl in high school, and her calling to the ministry has taught her how to be a boss lady when it's required.
After lunch Pam served shaved ice. A few purists muttered that snow cones, with their thicker ice particles, were not genuine "shaved ice." Having had neither for years, I gave her an A for effort and slurped away.
On the 60th anniversary of his assassination, I am rerunning this post I wrote 20 years ago:
Mrs. Matthews calmly told us the news, but her normally severe demeanor seemed strained. She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. The class grew quiet. In the face of tragedy we tried to act like adults, who we thought would not cry or shout or otherwise carry on.
After an interminable wait, school finally let out, and kids got into their buses or waiting cars. My ride wouldn’t come for another hour so I wandered around the empty halls. I thought about going to the main office to call Mom, but the phone was only to be used in the direst emergency, like the time I got sick in Mrs. Millar’s fourth grade class and my father had to take off work to pick me up. I borrowed a book from the library and went across the street to wait for my uncle. I opened the book but didn’t see the pages.
These days we say we are “shocked” or “stunned” by an occurrence, when, in truth, our imagination, combined with knowledge of actual horrors experienced over the past 40 years, has inoculated us against surprise. But those reactions are appropriate to this seminal event, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, that signaled the end of our childhood.
The entire week was quiet. No one felt like playing football, so games were cancelled. The churches were filled, just as they were a year earlier when we prayed that God would spare the world. It was a week of blackness--black suits, dresses, and veils filling our black-and-white TV sets and newspapers.
In 1960 my parents supported Richard Nixon, and, being an imitative child, so did I. But once JFK was elected, he became the President and had our unswerving allegiance. The world was extremely dangerous. As we learned in geography, Russia had the most land, China had the most people, and these colossi were united against us. And more and more were joining their fold: people in Africa, in South America, even in neighboring Mexico, were burning the flag (I remember when some burned the old flag with 48 stars: didn’t they know that Hawaii and Alaska had become States?). The map of the world that hung on the bedroom wall was bathed in red, the color of communism, while the blue part--the United States, Canada, Western Europe, and Japan—seemed puny in comparison.
At school we would practice ducking under our desks in case the bombs started falling. People say now that these instructions were a big joke, but I didn’t know anyone who laughed. Life and Look magazines ran page after page on the devastation wrought by atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I studied the huge mushroom cloud produced by the thousand-times more powerful hydrogen bomb over Bikini Atoll. Today children have nightmares about the Twin Towers falling; we worried about towers vaporizing…..everywhere.
President Kennedy also contended with many problems on the Mainland, as we called the contiguous 48 states. (I don’t want to give the impression that in my tender years I was a news junkie: it was primarily to advance my vocabulary that I read the grown-ups’ newspapers, the morning Advertiser and evening Star-Bulletin.) Good news was rare. Powerful labor unions, such as the Teamsters and steelworkers, went on strike and shut down much of the country. Troops had to be sent to Alabama because Governor Wallace wouldn’t let black kids go to school. The powerful Mafia was a big problem on the East Coast, and Robert Kennedy, the callow Attorney General, seemed inadequate to the task. As the Untouchables TV series vividly showed, you needed men with machine guns to take them on, and the President’s younger brother did not have the authoritative air of Elliott Ness.
The troubles came to a head in October, 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis. The fear in adults was palpable, and I became convinced, after a few days of excruciating tension, that the world was going to be destroyed. Every night I concentrated with special fervor on the final line of the children’s prayer, “if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take”. When the Russian ships turned around, and Mr. Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba, I felt the exultation of the patient who is given a second chance, and President Kennedy was my doctor.
Unlike last year, our church did not set up a booth at the Summer Days festival (August 18-20) in Foster City. I did reserve a space with the City last month but eventually sent our regrets.
Our usual volunteers were on vacation, and the energy from 2022's re-opening had dissipated, not just for us but for the community as a whole. There were fewer booths, both business and non-profits, than 2022.
Foot traffic wasn't overly heavy on Saturday afternoon.
There were decent lines at the food trucks, the rides, and other attractions.
Organizers thoughtfully set up tables, chairs, and tents for diners and fair-goers who just wanted to sit in the shade. The festival was kid and elderly friendly, which would have gone without saying 20 years ago but is now a rare sight in the Bay Area.
For a glimpse of gatherings as they used to be, see the photo (right) from three years ago, February 8, 2020, at the Punahou Carnival in Honolulu just before everything was locked down. Sometimes things really were better in the old days.
Al Harrington took his place behind the lectern. The year was 1966.
He had played football in high school and had returned as a football coach. My expectations were low; all coaches were expected to teach a course. I assumed that freshman European History was not his primary focus.
(Teaching wasn't the priority for my 8th-grade Biology teacher who was also a world-class surfer.)
I was wrong about Mr Harrington. He was fully prepared for his lectures, speaking authoritatively in a voice that seemed almost theatrically trained. He assigned homework from the text every night and got it back to us promptly, marked with bold flourishes.
But what I remember most clearly from those days was the passion with which he spoke, and how he emphasized the points that were important. His wasn't the cheap and easy kind of history teaching, where the students are inundated with dates and genealogical charts, but the one that explicated the forces behind the Renaissance and Reformation, and showed how Napoleon arose from the French Revolution.
As a senior I signed up for AP European History. It was a breeze, and so was the exam, thanks to the preparation from Mr. Harrington three years earlier
In 1972 Al Harrington's talent was recognized by the producers of the original Hawaii Five-O when he was signed to the role of Ben Kokua. His entertainment career took off, and we lost a great teacher.
He died yesterday of a stroke. RIP.
Below is Al Harrington speaking at Punahou School at the groundbreaking for a new sports facility in 1979
My high school class formed a Facebook group in preparation for the 50th reunion last summer, which, as might be expected, was cancelled. The organizational effort was not totally wasted, however, because now there was a message board that we used to catch up with each other, mourn classmates who had passed on, and wax nostalgic about high-school and earlier years (those who attended from kindergarten to 12th grade are members of the "13 Plus" club).
The orchestra was required to play "Pomp and Circumstance" every June, so I attended three graduations before it was our turn to march in.
The class ahead of ours chose as their song Try to Remember from the off-Broadway musical the Fantasticks. TTR is a sentimental number about reflecting back on a youth that is gone too quickly. Emotions were heartfelt; the war was raging, they were about to register for the draft, half the class was leaving the Islands, and many would never see each other again.
Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and grain was yellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When you were a tender and callow fellow.
Try to remember, and if you remember,
Then follow.
The original Fantasticks cast member who sang Try to Remember is Jerry Orbach (1935-2004), whom I only knew as an actor in the hit series Murder She Wrote and Law & Order. Here he is in 1982, 22 years after he introduced it on the stage.
And now, for something enjoyable...and a little poignant.
Singin' in the Rain is my favorite musical. If I come across the movie while channel surfing (something that old folks do on "cable TV"), I'll stop to watch though I've seen it dozens of times. Singin' in the Rain's song-and-dance routines are the most well-known in movies, with the choreography as memorable as the music.
It requires courage to stage a production of Singin'in the Rain, given the fame of the original and the difficulty in finding leads with the requisite talent. Nevertheless, it was all coming together for Punahou High, my alma mater, until COVID-19 cancelled the opening this month. Fortunately, the school pieced together recordings of some of the rehearsals (see below, music begins at 6:54).
With many thousands of people suffering from COVID-19 and millions on the front lines battling the virus every day, it seems crass and unfeeling to complain about the difficulties of those of us who merely have to stay home. Nevertheless, give a thought to quiet heartbreaks. In life we don't get a lot of those big celebrations, n'est-ce pas?
Many long-anticipated milestones will now never happen—or will pass by unobserved—as celebrations and events get canceled. Beneath the world-wide upheaval of lockdowns, quarantines and shortages, thousands of people are also privately mourning the loss of life’s special moments.
"Big" birthdays, hospital vigils, sports championships, graduations---the highs and lows of life when the human connection is most important--are gone.
I've been looking forward to my 50th class reunion in Hawaii this June. There's been no official announcement, but cancellation is 99% likely; some have already sent in regrets due to the uncertainty. Though the reunion is likely to be deferred to 2021 or perhaps this fall, attendance will surely suffer. Given the number of people who live on the Mainland, and trying not to be too morbid, some of us will miss a chance to see others for the last time.
The night-blooming cereus is one of the few landmarks that hadn't changed. I passed by the rock wall and hedge a couple of times a week for nine years during the Sixties. The cereus is never in bloom during the carnival, but one can't have everything.
June through October is when it puts on its show, with the flowers beginning to open in the late afternoon, and wilting as day breaks.
(stevendn.smugmug.com image)
They truly are splendid - twenty-five or so centimeters of fragrant, creamy white petals with a yellow center....The story is that it was brought to Honolulu by Charles Brewer, the first mate on the Ivanhoe, who had picked it from Mexico en route to Hawaii. He gave a cutting of it to Sybil Bingham, who planted it around the Punahou campus in the 1830's. Today the hedge on the lava rock wall of the campus is over three hundred meters long, and brings many admirers when it blossoms.
I came to see the carnival, but a few minutes alone in the shadows with my memories were the best part of the evening.
The entrance on Punahou and Wilder appeared massive when I was in fourth grade. Now it looked much smaller, especially with the bright lights beckoning from inside.
I didn't recognize it. When the junior class ran the event in 1969, it had a family feel.
On this Saturday night thousands more people crammed on to Chamberlain Field than back in the day. There were long lines to every ride and concession stand. Parents held onto their charges' hands as if their life depended on it. I couldn't get close to anything, not even nearby Montague Hall where I took six years of violin lessons.
A high school classmate posted a picture of himself in front of a work by his artist wife. He asked us to help him name the work. My response below.
"s-ENT-i-ENT" (Lord of the Rings nerdy reference).
Actually the photo of yourself Chillin' (hey, another possible title) is itself a work of art--art within art, if you will. Yes, the relief with its blue, brown, black, and white is a timeless evocation of winter, and if you were just gazing at the trees it wouldn't be adding much. But you're holding a smartphone, which places you in the 2010-2020 decade for anyone looking at this 100 years from now.
Also, you're ignoring the beauty of the art and staring at a tiny screen--a tableau of our time (hey, yet another title).
Well, enough of this---gotta get back to answering my texts.
I have to ask him who the photographer was. If it was his wife, wouldn't it be something if she created the wall art so he could be photographed in front of it. The photo was the intended work! OK, back to reality, he couldn't have married someone that smart....
Dad called tonight to tell me the sad news about Melvin. Uncle Mel was a quiet man. Sure, when he was among family and had downed a few, Uncle Mel would become more talkative, but he was never as boisterous as the other guys sitting around the table. He was typical of the greatest generation which served its country, then went about its business, working and raising a family.
Uncle Mel was proud of his Hawaiian heritage and went to Kamehameha. When I began attending its rival, he took me to the Kam-Punahou football game at the old Honolulu Stadium. My 9-year-old self loudly cheered as the Puns won, 20-0. Uncle Mel told my parents that I gloated, and to this day I am sorry that I did. You were a good man, Uncle Mel, and I'll miss you. R.I.P.
Mrs. Matthews calmly told us the news, but her normally severe demeanor seemed strained. She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. The class grew quiet. In the face of tragedy we tried to act like adults, who we thought would not cry or shout or otherwise carry on.
After an interminable wait, school finally let out, and kids got into their buses or waiting cars. My ride wouldn’t come for another hour so I wandered around the empty halls. I thought about going to the main office to call Mom, but the phone was only to be used in the direst emergency, like the time I got sick in Mrs. Millar’s fourth grade class and my father had to take off work to pick me up. I borrowed a book from the library and went across the street to wait for my uncle. I opened the book but didn’t see the pages.
These days we say we are “shocked” or “stunned” by an occurrence, when, in truth, our imagination, combined with knowledge of actual horrors experienced over the past 40 years, has inoculated us against surprise. But those reactions are appropriate to this seminal event, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, that signaled the end of our childhood.
The entire week was quiet. No one felt like playing football, so games were cancelled. The churches were filled, just as they were a year earlier when we prayed that God would spare the world. It was a week of blackness--black suits, dresses, and veils filling our black-and-white TV sets and newspapers.
In 1960 my parents supported Richard Nixon, and, being an imitative child, so did I. But once JFK was elected, he became the President and had our unswerving allegiance. The world was extremely dangerous. As we learned in geography, Russia had the most land, China had the most people, and these colossi were united against us. And more and more were joining their fold: people in Africa, in South America, even in neighboring Mexico, were burning the flag (I remember when some burned the old flag with 48 stars: didn’t they know that Hawaii and Alaska had become States?). The map of the world that hung on the bedroom wall was bathed in red, the color of communism, while the blue part--the United States, Canada, Western Europe, and Japan—seemed puny in comparison.
At school we would practice ducking under our desks in case the bombs started falling. People say now that these instructions were a big joke, but I didn’t know anyone who laughed. Life and Look magazines ran page after page on the devastation wrought by atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I studied the huge mushroom cloud produced by the thousand-times more powerful hydrogen bomb over Bikini Atoll. Today children have nightmares about the Twin Towers falling; we worried about towers vaporizing…..everywhere.
President Kennedy also contended with many problems on the Mainland, as we called the contiguous 48 states. (I don’t want to give the impression that in my tender years I was a news junkie: it was primarily to advance my vocabulary that I read the grown-ups’ newspapers, the morning Advertiser and evening Star-Bulletin.) Good news was rare. Powerful labor unions, such as the Teamsters and steelworkers, went on strike and shut down much of the country. Troops had to be sent to Alabama because Governor Wallace wouldn’t let black kids go to school. The powerful Mafia was a big problem on the East Coast, and Robert Kennedy, the callow Attorney General, seemed inadequate to the task. As the Untouchables TV series vividly showed, you needed men with machine guns to take them on, and the President’s younger brother did not have the authoritative air of Elliott Ness.
The troubles came to a head in October, 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis. The fear in adults was palpable, and I became convinced, after a few days of excruciating tension, that the world was going to be destroyed. Every night I concentrated with special fervor on the final line of the children’s prayer, “if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take”. When the Russian ships turned around, and Mr. Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba, I felt the exultation of the patient who is given a second chance, and President Kennedy was my doctor.
I first saw the newsfilm of "I Have a Dream" in its entirety in 1969, the year after Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. In truth I wasn't ready to appreciate it in 1963 when I was a pre-teen.
Growing up in Hawaii my friends and I were all far removed from the civil rights movement, Mississippi and Alabama. Our class had one African-American student, a friendly guy and a terrific athlete (!). It didn't seem comprehensible that some people could hate our classmate because of the color of his skin. In retrospect, although he seemed to fit in with the multiracial student body, I have absolutely no idea what he really thought or felt. (It turned out that another black kid in our elementary school at that time did feel out of place.)
The greatest American speech surprised me with its power and, yes, beauty. Sure, I had read its text, but watching Dr. King and hearing his preacherly cadences calling forth the best in each listener filled this then-teenager with emotion. He and John F. Kennedy two years earlier had asked us to look to the mountaintop. Their dreams seemed impossible, but with these men leading us perhaps we had a chance to get there. In the wink of an eye they were both gone.
I had never heard the songbook of Finian's Rainbow until our high school performed it. We had wonderful singers and talented comedic actors in the class ahead of us, and playing in the concert orchestra I was lucky to have a front row seat.
The tunes have stayed with me---much more than other Sixties musicals that garnered more awards---but, now that I am closer in age to the old Irish father than his daughter, the lyrics take on poignancy.
How are things in Glocca Morra?
Is that little brook still leaping there?
Does it still run down to Donny cove
Through Killybegs, Kilkerry and Kildare?
How are things in Glocca Morra?
Is that willow tree still weeping there?
Does that laddie with the twinkling eye
Come whistling by? And does he walk away
Sad and dreamy there, not to see me there?
Happy Saint Patrick's Day, especially to everyone who is far from home.
[Note: the 1968 film with Fred Astaire and Petula Clark, directed by Francis Ford Coppola(!), is on Amazon Streaming Video and is free to Amazon Prime customers.]
Sandwiched between news about the girls' volleyball team and an L.A. luau, the high school's newsletter has an article about an alumnus who went into politics. I'm glad they wrote about him---else, who would have known?
With a feeling of nostalgia I read about the preparation for the annual February Carnival (where rides cost ten times the 25 cents I used to pay), the items on sale at the Bookstore (where I got my first job at the age of 11 and learned how to count back change instead of having it computed by an electronic cash register), and what's going on with my classmates' kids and grandkids.
I still send the school a (small) check every year and get an acknowledgment back from J. When I saw him at the last big reunion, he appeared relaxed. The worry lines are less pronounced, and he's wearing the mantle of leadership well.
Today one of my best friends from high school turned 60. I haven't spoken to him much over the years. There was no falling out---life happened, and we drifted apart.
I called to wish him well. We still have a lot in common--we both have a child who has graduated from college and another who's still going to school. We worry about our aging parents, all of whom, thank goodness, are still with us. We work part-time and are increasingly engaged in charitable pursuits.
Barely perceptibly we are going into that good night. Perhaps our paths will converge more often. Whether we drift away or toward each other is a choice, better made sooner than later.
Charlie Wedemeyer, the Los Gatos high school football coach whose 32-year battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (“Lou Gehrig’s disease”) ended one year ago today, inspired thousands of people with his optimism, generosity, and appreciation for life. His attitude was all the more remarkable since in his youth he was endowed with physical talent and grace afforded to few mortals. The disease that robbed him of his special talents, then his mobility, and finally his independence would have made lesser men reclusive and bitter. But not once did he show the anger that the rest of us would consider entirely justifiable. Many said “he's the most amazing guy you'll ever meet.”
While Charlie Wedemeyer’s battle against debilitating disease is perhaps the main reason he will be remembered, let’s take a moment to pay tribute to Charlie Wedemeyer the football player, who dazzled high school football fans during the early Sixties.
Before satellites beamed live professional sports to Hawaii, high school football was by far the most popular sport in the Islands. The old Honolulu Stadium (“termite palace”) was regularly filled to its 25,000-seat capacity for the big games. Passions over contests between St. Louis and McKinley or Punahou and Roosevelt easily matched the intensity of Stanford vs. Cal or Harvard vs. Yale.
Punahou’s 1961 undefeated team is considered to be among the best in Hawaiian high school football history, but after nearly all its starters graduated, expectations were low for Punahou in the following season. Halfway through the 1962 schedule, the young sophomore- and junior-laden squad was expected to be blown out by bigger, faster Kamehameha.
The first time Punahou went on offense the team shifted from a standard “T” to a single-wing formation. At all levels of football the single-wing had fallen out of favor after 1950 because it relied heavily on the rare back who can run, pass, read the defense, and even punt occasionally. Punahou found such a multi-skilled player in sophomore quarterback Charlie Wedemeyer. The undefeated Kam Warriors were physically superior, but Wedemeyer’s legs and arm kept them sufficiently off balance that the game ended in a 14-14 tie, the only blemish on Kam’s championship season.
Charlie Wedemeyer led Punahou to two championships. He was named Hawaii’s best player of the 1960’s and went on to great accomplishments on and off the field. But my indelible memory is of the young 5’7’’ quarterback, running and passing rings around a much bigger Warrior team in the old termite palace. R.I.P.
Note: the video below isn't exactly on topic because it's of the 1961 championship game between Punahou and Roosevelt. It has shots of Honolulu Stadium, the old scoreboard, and the baseball infield which had bare dirt even for a football game in November. From this geezer's perspective, the Punahou team looks pretty good even by today's standards.
Allan L.C. Yuen, 81, of Honolulu, a retired Guam Community College administrator, died in Honolulu. He was born in Hawaii. He is survived by sons Christen and Shelten; brothers Alfren and Robert; sisters Bow Yin Ching and Eva Mokiao; and two grandchildren. Mass: 9:30 a.m. Thursday at Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church. Call after 8:30 a.m. Committal services: 2 p.m. at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, Punchbowl. Aloha attire. No flowers. –From the Star Advertiser
I rarely saw Uncle Allan during my childhood. He lived in Los Angeles during the 1950’s and returned with stories of six-lane freeways where monster trucks would tailgate you at 70 miles per hour. To a credulous kid who had never gone faster than 50 it sounded both horrifying and exciting.
Uncle Allan was the clan’s educated man. He had a Master's degree when most in the family didn't even go to college. He was not philosophical like my Uncle Jack, the engineer and professor, but worldly-wise. He chain-smoked. He was left-handed. My grandmother despaired of him ever getting married. Despite his irreverent mien he regularly attended Catholic services. He had a Mainlander’s ‘tude. I admired him but never told him because it wouldn’t have been cool.
He returned to the Islands and taught at Maryknoll, the Catholic school across the street from Punahou. During my middle school years I would wait on the chapel steps for him to give me a ride home. One of the high points of my day was to get in his Ford Mustang, the driver dangling the cigarette from the window.
After I left for college, I was surprised to hear that he got married to a lady who didn’t speak much English. The union didn’t last, but not before it had produced two sons. I now had two new cousins who were younger than other cousins’ kids.
His restless spirit didn’t permit him to be confined to our island for long, and his travels took him to Guam and Chico in central California. As age’s infirmities began to nag, he returned to Hawaii to be close to his brothers and sisters. He quit smoking and went for daily walks. He learned to love e-mail, especially because he could communicate instantaneously with his sons who were thousands of miles away. He proudly showed me pictures of his grandchildren.
Last April Uncle Allan was admitted to Queen’s Hospital for abdominal bleeding that the doctors couldn’t stop. When I saw him in June he was hooked up to an array of devices, the once voluble man rendered silent by the tubes down his throat. His eyes and his hands, gripping mine, showed that he was listening. As I reminisced, I didn’t see the frail white-haired figure on the hospital bed but the jaunty bachelor grinning and waving goodbye as his Mustang roared away. His ashes are now in Punchbowl, joining three of his brothers. Rest in peace, Uncle. Thank you for our journey together.
It's been nearly four decades since I moved away. Although I've been back many times for short visits, this was the first occasion in which I reconnected with many of those with whom I had spent my youth.
We had our reunion dinner at the Mid-Pacific Country Club in Lanikai, where a well-known alumnus likes to hang out when he returns to Oahu. The Ko'olau mountains, jagged in their youth and now softer and rounder in their middle age, provided a fitting backdrop for a class picture.
Professional photographer Eric Y. snapped away, adding to his 40-year collection of class negatives. When he ran his slide show of senior-year memories, I had three thoughts:
1) I'm glad he took those pictures;
2) I regret my youthful irritation at Eric's ubiquitous camera;
3) We had some very attractive young ladies in our class--if only I had taken the time to notice!
We honored those whom we will never see again. Each of us was alone with our thoughts as pictures and memories played across the screen. Lisa K. reprised the A.A. Milne passage that she read at our graduation; I flashed back to that moment in Mr. Lichthardt's eighth-grade English class when she spoke about Christopher Robin and his beloved bear. I'm sorry to admit that as a wiseacre young teen I stifled a snicker. How unaware was I about the little cruelties that I inflicted on others.
We formed a circle, held hands just as we used to in elementary school and as teen-agers in the Sixties, albeit for different reasons, and sang the mournful prayer of Queen Liliuokalani. In the original Hawaiian the prayer is especially beautiful, and remarkably even the Mainlanders remembered the words that we learned as children.
The evening flew quickly as we shouted the Cliff's Notes version of our lives to each other. I tried to make the rounds but only talked to a fraction of my classmates. The rest will have to wait until next time.
Billy greeted us at the entrance and gave me a hug that I reciprocated. That’s what decades of separation will do to people who had only a passing acquaintance. By the grace of God we had made it to our 40th reunion, unlike 31 of our less-lucky classmates.
I looked past the lawyers, doctors, landscapers, musicians, homebuilders and priests and saw instead the kids who I played tetherball, diagrammed sentences, and dissected frogs with. Through the gray hair, the wrinkles, and the extra pounds shone the essence of their characters. I missed them more than I knew.
We had parted in haste, eyes focused on the worlds we were about to conquer. Life happened in the meantime, our faces lined by joy, sadness, amusement, and regrets. Now we looked at each other, some for the first time, and smiled.
