Honestly, I didn’t even want to get out of the car. Before me was a ragtag assemblage of elderly folks in various stages of decrepitude, all come to celebrate the fact that, thanks largely to advances in medical science, each has survived to the age of eighty. First order of the day was to fill out a name tag, preferably in large print. To my dismay, I noticed that everyone I met was leaning in to read my name tag. Have I changed that much?
We were gathered at a pavilion in Pioneer Park, at the bottom of a gentle slope which, way back in the Fifties, was my favorite sledding hill. At the western edge of the park is a turnout locally known as Lover’s Lane. Directly east of the park is a nursing home, and beyond that is the town cemetery. In other words, just four city blocks from the point of conception to Little Jimmy Brown’s final resting place.
Underlying the Book Cliffs and Wasatch Plateau that bracket my hometown are bituminous coal seams, on the ceilings of which miners occasionally come upon the footprints of prehistoric reptiles—which is how our high school football team came to be called the Carbon High Dinosaurs. Our mascots were named Dino and Dina, shown here contributing to global warming by setting alight a homecoming bonfire.
In my day, we identified with the mild-mannered, vegetarian brontosaurus; however, in later years Carbon High upgraded to the tyrannosaur in hopes of striking fear in opposing teams. Which didn’t help much.
I remember at our first class reunion I was desperate to convince others that I had evolved. At the same time, I was eager to revel in the misfortunes of those classmates whose popularity had peaked in high school and whose post-graduation years savored of anticlimax. However, nowadays things are different. I’m just happy to find that approximately half of us are still breathing—thanks, again, to recent advances in medical science.
Lynn Reid informs me that he’s alive thanks to a heart transplant from a donor ten years his junior. Another former classmate, Ron Spensko, insists he will live to the age of a hundred, and I believe him. That is, unless his Harley gets mowed down by a Buick.
I was thinking of riding my own motorbike to the reunion, but then thought better of it. That’s because it’s come to my attention that medical science can’t save us from accidental death. So I make sure to always buckle up. I keep both hands on the wheel and both eyes on the road. At stoplights, I look both ways before proceeding. Moreover, being a dinosaur, I also look up. I mean, you never know what might be headed your way.
