Some years ago I had a giant purge of my Facebook contacts.
I got rid of almost all my former students and current co-workers here in beachside Ventura, California. I miss hearing some of the news about former students, but I don’t miss hearing about my co-workers. I decided to semi-strictly wall off my work life from my private life. It was a major moment. With a few notable exceptions, I don’t socialize with co-workers anymore. Work defines me so much less as a person than it did in the past. I do have a vocation and a career, but in the end it is also just a job.
As a result, during the once or twice a month occasions when I login to my neglected Facebook account, I see lots of postings by my friends from high school and college. They have gotten a new prominence in my online viewing, with so much of my work life winnowed away. I see so much more of the people who knew me before I became a teacher. These are people with whom I have a personal, not a professional, connection.
How has that been?
It has been an improvement!
And I feel as if I have reconnected with friends from decades ago.
I feel as if I am coming full circle back to where I started.
Nowadays I read books printed on paper mostly, instead of viewing social media on a screen.
I give my best time and attention to friends, not to co-workers.
I feel like I got a bit lost in middle age, but now I am returning to where I belong. To where I was at the beginning.
HIGH SCHOOL
I attended Corona del Mar High School and was a member of the Class of 1985. I knew most of these people since middle school, and some as far back as elementary school. The roots are deep: today in 2021 I have known them for the better part of four decades. I am glad to hear any news of my friends from my school days, and I am happy to see there is still a tight matrix of social connection between us. CdM ‘85 members live in all corners of the country and the world, and some are dead. But those of us alive and on Facebook still care about each other and stay in touch.
I attended our ten year high school class reunion in 1995. That was the post-college drinking scene still, with a raging social life ringed by powerful professional ambition. Then there was the twenty year reunion which I also attended. It was 24/7 family and career. Finally, I went to the 25-year reunion. This was the best one, in my opinion: ego was relenting, we were maturing, and the interaction was more genuine. And after all these years, it was wonderful to connect with those who had known me since almost the beginning. It was also fascinating to see how my classmate’s lives had played out over time. It underscored how life is not a sprint but more of a marathon. And approaching 50-years of age we seemed more honest with each other; we were more “human” in how we portrayed ourselves to each other compared to when we were younger and more full of ambition and ego, in my opinion. We had less to prove to the world. We were fully grown up. It was great to see. It was great to be with them.
I enjoy hearing news of Tom Kordick – a fellow educator, middle school admin in Novato – or Guy Putnins – PE teacher up near Santa Cruz – or Darren Wood, selling pharmaceuticals and still training for triathlons in Australia – or Jeff Tomlin, Annapolis graduate and Navy doctor
– so many other of my peers as we approach retirement age.
I am so glad to have my childhood friends and high school peers in my life so many years later.
I rarely post anything myself, but I am attentive to what my fellow Sea Kings have to say and share. I listen. I care.
COLLEGE
I was a member of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity while at UCLA. We endured hazing as pledges back in the fall of 1987 and were initiated into the “brotherhood” – and that fraternal bond still exists decades later. Some would say that fraternities are light on true friendship and heavy on alcohol and hookups. I would counter that they are solid on all these points. I made good friends in my fraternity at UCLA, and I care about them still.
For example, when brother Don Rohacek suffered life-threatening heart trouble we all rallied around to help him where we could, and followed Don’s travels on his blog. The Delts are there online on Facebook, and I am happy to hear any news of their lives. Whether it is Ken “the Pav” Pavia offering counter cultural conservative analysis from a MMA perspective, or Dan Weeks who still tailgates UCLA football games at the Rose bowl not unlike how we used to, or Greg Westhafer kicking butt in Texas, or Mike Nelson who sort of disappeared and who I miss, or Yvette who has raised two solid children into model adults. (A local troll sought to “cancel” me for supposedly drugging and assaulting her [or something?]. This much you would think reasonable people could figure out. But we were were deeply in love in a multiyear relationship, and are still friendly and in touch decades later while married to other people.) In a huge school like UCLA one has to make a smaller group of friends someway or other. I was lucky to find my people in Delta Tau Delta.
I know plenty who had humdrum experiences (or worse) in their romantic lives while in college. I had adventures! I know men and women who at 25 were married and divorced at 40, with only two or three lovers in their youth; this was their romantic biography, and it did not get much better trying to date again in middle age. That was not my experience, thank God. I drank deeply of single life before I married at 36-years of age. I have no regrets. Youth did not pass me by; I stepped up and embraced it. I don’t feel I missed out on anything. Carpe diem! The Delts helped teach me how to do that. I am thankful. It was an important part of my upbringing.
All the good times we had at the fraternity house at 649 Gayley Ave. in Westwood are not forgotten. I am glad to have my Delt brothers still in my life, even if it is mostly just on Facebook.
CONCLUSION
I will turn 55-years old next May. I will arrive at the age where I am eligible for early retirement. I am aging, slowly but surely. The older I get, the less ego and ambition hold sway. The less testosterone I have, the more I mellow. So I grow more and more comfortable in my own skin, even as that skin grows more sallow and acquires more wrinkles. Age has its consolations. I would never want to be 19-years old again – all that angst! Nor would I want to return to 40-years of age – (diapers? toddlers? 30 more years of work?) – no, thank you!
It is nice.
The infamous U-shaped curve of happiness seems to be at play, thankfully.
I am so grateful for all that I have.
And I am more indifferent than ever to what I don’t have.
Amen.
“We shall not cease from exploration
T.S. Eliot
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
“Little Gidding”
