Class of '21




I've hit that stage in my life.

Yesterday, as I was pulling into to the supermarket parking lot  to pick up some toilet paper (now back in supply!), a pickup truck passed by me, the words Class of '21, in giant lettering,  scrawled across its back windshield. 

Class of '21...wow, I'm getting old. I'm pretty sure my high school yearbooks are proudly displayed in somebody's vintage book collection; the '79 Chrysler LeBaron I once drove is sporting antique license plates (if it exists at all); and my master recording of Dark Side of the Moon could exact a tidy sum from some online vinyl collector.  But perhaps the greatest attestation of my age and place in modern history is not some dusty collectable or embellished memory- it is the fact that I have a daughter who is Class of 2021.

I remember another member of the "Class of '21". When I was a college student in the eighties, he served as registrar and my unofficial premed advisor.  I thought he was ancient, because he was. He was an old  biology professor emeritus who remained around campus after retirement from his (our) Alma Mater. As kyphotic and wrinkled as he was, his mind remained sharp and he provided me invaluable off-the-cuff advice which helped me to ultimately gain admission into medical school.

His name was Cyrus Flook, and he was a member of the Class of '21......1921!...nineteen twenty-one!

My old premed advisor & my daughter. I now have personal connections, and vivid memories of, members of graduating classes a century apart. Just....wow. That very idea, that I know people who graduated 100 years apart (more than that really, since Mr. Flook was a college grad that year while my daughter is a high school senior), makes my head explode. 

Where does that put me? With regards to this concept, I'm not sure I care all that much. Bringing it back to be about me would be egoic, something I try to avoid in Long-Term Recovery Land. But I do know that tinkering with this concept is freakin' cool. 

I think. 




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Intubating Alcoholics

Image
In the past week I have put three alcoholics on life support. The first one was 39 years old. He arrived to the emergency department by EMS unconscious with almost no blood pressure. I placed my ultrasound probe on his heart and saw it was beating alright,  just very little blood was entering his ventricles. This is because he was bleeding to death. When I intubated him I saw pooled blood in the back of his throat. His liver was so far gone, so cirrhotic, that blood could not easily pass through it, and the backup and created high vein pressures on sensitive areas like his esophagus and stomach, whose linings themselves were eroded from the caustic effects of constant boozing. He was literally hemorrhaging internally, and it took many units of blood to even get a pressure back. He made it to the ICU, and later that night, died. We later learned from family that he had moved back to town "to get sober." Case two was  a 53 year old chronic alcoholic who came to me con...
Read more

Whiskey on the Walls

Image
Alcoholics in long-term recovery maintain a keen awareness  of any booze in our immediate vicinity. Whether sober a week or twenty years, we keep a heightened sensitivity to its presence in a room. So when my hospital chose to line the hallways with it, needless to say the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. These days hand sanitizer has become as ubiquitous as cellphones, face masks, and Bradley Cooper; you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a dispenser. Companies simply cannot keep up with the demand. This being the case, a local valley distillery came up with the brilliant idea to temporarily convert its operations from whiskey to full-time sanitizer production, and began to supply local medical facilities. My hospital has been buying the stuff in bulk, restocking its depleted stores,  and filling all its dispensers with it. Here's the problem. Distilleries using equipment which had been continuously producing hard liquor for years can't magically c...
Read more

Baby Soul

Image
It’s  Baby Soul Day! In my younger teen years, I worshipped the iconic band Rush. At age 14 I was small, nerdy, intellectual, and afraid of my own shadow. Geddy Lee's voice, Alex Lifeson's guitar, and Neal Peart's lyrics encapsulated perfectly how I felt growing up in 1980s suburban North Jersey surrounded by big studly Italian boys and athletic Irish kids.  Neither the albums  Moving Pictures nor  Signals left my turntable *ever* unless I was simply swapping out one for the other. I hid in my room, pretending how I was going to somehow be cool, be accepted, break out. 30 years later, as I felt myself inevitably sinking in alcoholic quicksand, I read Neal Peart's memoir  Ghost Rider . Having lost his daughter to a car crash and wife to cancer within the same year, the legendary drummer one morning mounted his motorcycle and embarked on a two-year tour of the Americas, riding wherever the wind (his HP?) took him. While journaling his geographic advent...
Read more