This last week of May, 2021, one of my friends from high school noted on his Facebook page that the last Friday of this month would be the 50th anniversary of the last day of high school class for the graduating senior class of 1971, at Robert E. Lee High School, in Houston. Fifty years... is that possible? One-half of an entire century—that’s the amount of time which has passed since I walked out of Robert E. Lee High School for the last time.

How so much has changed in the world, and for me personally, in those fifty years. In 1971 America was still fighting the Vietnam war, and all of us male graduates were in danger of being drafted. Marvin Gaye was singing “What’s Going On?” and I was asking the same question. I was about to head off to the University of Texas at Austin, where, thankfully,  they admitted just about anyone, and my tuition for a full load of classes was $300/semester. That summer, I worked at the Houston theme park, Astroworld, a place that no longer exists. My high school was named after a Civil War general, back when some folks thought that was a good idea. Neither the high school, nor the name of the high school are around anymore.

I drove an Opel Kadett, a cheap German economy car, back when Germans did cheap economy vehicles. Houston was not the culinary center it is today. The best restaurant in town, Sonny Look’s on Westheimer, made good by peddling rubbery steaks. My stepbrother, David, made a decent minimum wage of 75 cents an hour there, baking in an actual suit of armor while sitting in the hot Texas sun on a real horse outside the front entrance, just to prove that Sonny Look’s was somehow really connected with real English ancestry. I never did get the connection but it all looked pretty cool if you did not consider the health and comfort of the guy inside the suit of armor, or the horse. 

Me in 1971? I was a pimply faced skinny-assed homebody with few discernible talents, except that I was a truly exceptional grocery bagger. I plied my trade at Weingartens grocery store on South Post Oak Road for several years making $25/day on Saturdays and Sundays when old ladies would tip me a quarter to take out their bags of groceries to their car. 

I also turned out to be a fairly good "animal character" at Astroworld, where,  like my armored knight stepbrother at Sonny Look’s, I too baked in the hot Texas sun underneath a bulky, nonsensical costume. My heat trap was a comical rat suit. I walked around the theme park greeting little kids as the Mickey Mouse look-alike character, Ray Rat. In fact, I invented that name for the rat-costumed character, and it actually stuck until the rat costume was retired several years later.

Truth be told, my actual talent was that I was tall enough and skinny enough to fit in that suit, and crazy enough to endure the heat for hours on end. Put another way, my best talent was "not knowing I couldn’t, or shouldn’t.” This turned out to be my secret weapon for the next fifty years, as I continuously got myself into things which I should not have been doing and was forced to figure it out once I realized my predicament. Everyone has a super hero talent: mine was the ability to maintain a healthy degree of ignorance until it was too late and then to make-do or in some cases, even make good. Yes, my mother's name was indeed "Necessity". 

This was my world in 1971, fifty years ago. Looking back on this from my vantage point of the year 2021... My, how things have changed!

How long is fifty years? How long should fifty years feel? 

Let’s go backwards in time fifty years from my graduation date in 1971 to understand just how much sand passes through the hourglass during such a period. That would have been  the year 1921. The world was still emerging from the horrors of WWI and the deadly influenza pandemic of 1918, which had ravaged the entire world and killed around 50 million worldwide.

Like the flu, another pandemic also raged throughout America that year, that of the deadly and barbaric racism of the Jim Crow era. The year 1921 saw the Tulsa Race Massacre—only recently brought back into national consciousness—where an entire community of Black residences and businesses were burned to the ground and dozens were lynched. In 1921, Adolph Hitler became the Fuhrer of the Nazi Party, Franklin Roosevelt had not yet been struck down by polio. The first Major League Baseball game was broadcast... on the radio. Going to movies was a popular pastime, but they were all silent. An upstart Italian designer began to sell expensive handbags, and few thought Mr. Gucci would ever get away with the prices he was charging. Almost nobody had ever flown on an airplane, and if they travelled at all, they went by train. If they owned a car (and most didn’t), it was black.

This was the world of our grandparents, as they graduated from their high schools, if they graduated, since in the world of 1921 most never made it that far in school. They could not have imagined the world into which their grandchildren, we the class of 1971, emerged. They assumed, like we all do, that somehow everything would be slightly advanced but basically the same, fifty years on. Just like we did in 1971. 

When we pushed that horizontal pipe handle of the flat-gray metal door to the outside of school and exited into the hot and humid late May afternoon in Houston, Texas, we probably thought we would simply straight-line it from that moment—until this, fifty years later. No one could have told me then that the path forward would end up being such a zig-zag, and that the destination was so far over the horizon, that I could never have imagined it at the time.

It’s relatively easy to envision the world fifty or even one hundred years behind you. We have the benefit of history, records, and personal recollection. But what do we think fifty years into the future might look like, in the year 2071? Imagine that my son, Ben, who now is about to graduate from the University of Washington, gets a communication (surely not through something as old fashioned as a Facebook post), from one of his classmates, reminding him of the exact day they walked out of their last class on campus in Seattle, way back in 2021.

Like me, he may have forgotten the details of the moment, but also like me, he will most likely remember the feeling. Then he will start to reminisce about the fifty years just past and perhaps wonder where all of the time went. At first, fifty years sounds like such a long time. But on many other levels, it can also seem like a brief flicker of life. Deep within our minds, our hearts, our souls, there is a place where it still feels like "only yesterday" we were back in high school, college, getting married, having our first child, getting that promotion, buying the family home, saying goodbye to a loved one. Overcoming failure, defeat, tragedy. If we are lucky, we can still recall all of these sorts of things and more as if they were just “yesterday.” 

The string of time tugs us in both directions, into our past, and toward our future. Our aspirations, yearnings, loves, and even our fears, are the anchors for that string. We remember what we wish to remember, not all there is to be remembered. Similarly, the tug of our future is what we expect to happen, not what will actually happen. 

My theory is not that the string lies, but rather that it does not give you the whole story. Every fifty years, it's good to have somebody tug on the string by reminding me that fifty years have passed. It has been fun to consider what it is that I have been doing, and how it is that I have been living, these past fifty years. 

But perhaps more importantly, it gives me the opportunity to view the past fifty years in a completely different way than I would have viewed them from 1971 going forward to now.  

It turns out that my vision of the future was like looking through a telescope using the wrong end—everything looking forward was not magnified but rather reduced. The angle of my vision was narrow, and my expectations were stunted. However, looking back now, I can see the passage of the past fifty years more sharply; the angle and field of vision expands beyond what I ever thought it might be. Time has told me that life has been far bigger than I expected when I walked out of class at Robert E. Lee High School back in 1971.

Graduation is more than just walking away from your past, completing a curriculum, walking across a stage to get a piece of paper, and moving on. You only truly graduate when you learn how to walk toward the far bigger things in life. Things like finding something, and someone, to live for. Things like learning how to think about someone other than yourself. Things like doing something because you love it and realizing that you are good at it. Things like learning to let it go and leave it be. 

The biggest things in life involve learning to live in peace with yourself and with those around you. In other words, you graduate when you can live in a happy state. Honestly, on that May 28th, 1971, I did not know any of that stuff existed, and I sure did not know how to visualize it as part of my next fifty years of life. But now I do. And I am so grateful.

So now, fifty years from that date of our high school graduation, I now declare myself officially “graduated.” I am turning the virtual tassel of my virtual hat, as you read this. Woohoo!