I'm not a big fan of the neuralgia of nostalgia. At a tick over seventy (still within the speed limit in some states), I realize there's more in the mirror than up ahead but I don't spend a lot of time looking back because that's not where I'm heading.
All of that is a preface and prelude for a short chapter out of the story of my life from over a half-century ago and I wish I could say it makes me smile, but it doesn't but there's always a chance it will with you.
As with all old stories, it starts with old technology, in this case, America On-Line, AOL. Remember when these were the three happiest words in the English language? Strange days indeed. Did you know at one point AOL bought Time Warner and seemed to be unstoppable? Yeah, that's another story for another time. Now, like Netscape, Prodigy, Blackberry, and Palm Pilots, it's another Ozymandias.
Except, Percy, I still have an AOL email account. I've forgotten about it more often in the last decades than I've remembered it, but it's still around and still receives mail. Not that long ago, and sort of the precipitant for today's meanderings, I had an email from one of the two preparatory schools I attended for high school.
My father was headmaster of the Lower School and I was, I always assumed, a scholarship child in the Upper School. I (we, my dad and I) commuted from New Jersey and I think aside from George B, who lived in Brooklyn, everyone else lived in Manhattan. That actually changed junior year when my father recruited the very tall son of a fellow who got on the train with us in Metuchen every weekday to attend school and play basketball. Not necessarily in that order as it turned out.
Lots of things happened fifty-two years ago and among them was my dad leaving his position with the school and our family moving to Rhinebeck, New York, for what felt like about an hour but was at least a week to ten days, and then we moved to East Rutherford, New Jersey, where he took a position at a prep school in West Orange where I, as a sort of sullen BOGO I guess, completed my senior year. That prep school closed after my class graduated and I suspect the real estate overlooking New York City fetched a pretty penny.
Anyway, a couple of weeks ago in the AOL mail was an invitation from my first prep school to attend a fiftieth reunion celebration that was rescheduled because of COVID-19. By the time, I opened the e-mail the date of the event had passed, not that I would have been even vaguely tempted, but what struck me was a photo attached to the email and how many of the names I could match to the faces in the photo.
-bill kenny
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