Once again the earth has completed a trip around the sun and it is the holidays – the big December holidays – the get the whole family together and call in the friends and pull out the best china and the best gifts holidays. She has been chained to the kitchen, barely escaping to go serve somewhere else when someone calls, “I need a ride,” “I need a walk,” “I need a helping hand.” Chained, I say, but not a slave. She has been baking cookies and tamales and eggrolls and savory chicken soup and more cookies. As fast as she bakes and makes them she gives them away. There is the meal at church before the Christmas Eve service. There is a single friend who won’t be traveling home to family. There is a gracefully aging mother and an aged grandfather who eat freely and gratefully from her culinary concoctions. She reaches out and shares with those in need – and with those who have it all together and have no felt or expressed need. There is the friend who has no family and has been alone so long they are inured, and the friend who has everything one can achieve in life except a family. Food is such an assuager of loneliness, such a comfort to melancholy.

She cooks, she bakes, she does the endless clean up and dish washing. She delivers and spends time and listens.  This is the routine I know from my childhood. These are the activities I watched my mother perform – the routines it was expected I perform as well. Yet they were grueling; the cooking, the clean-up. My mother was constantly fatigued. But one must, one must serve. It is required. I said fie on the requirements some years ago and began to limit my activities to what I wanted to reach out and do, not to what I felt I should do, or what would make me look good.

This year I watched her in the weeks before the holidays. I watched her bake. I watched her cook. I watched her spend an enormous amount of time and effort in the kitchen and in service to others. She smiled. There was joy on her face, not the fatigued misery of slavery. And I commented, “I am thinking service must be your primary love language.” “No,” she said, “not service.” I raised my eyebrows in surprise. “But you are so good at it! And you do it with enjoyment, not like a drudgery.” “My primary love language,” she said, “is gifts.” “The tamales, the green chili chicken, the cookies, the eggrolls; these are the gifts I have to give.”

This revelation comes to me as a tremendous relief. I want to love and be loved in return but sometimes I am confused. Typically, humans give and receive best in our primary love language. I have found it a challenge when someone’s primary love language is service. I serve only as duty so I have frugal means of reciprocating without smothering. Anyway, the server serves so well the bases are covered; there is nothing to do in return. But gifts? I understand the love language of gifts. And I also understand words of affirmation. It was a good Christmas Eve, it was a good Christmas, it was a good Hannukah. Friends, you did well!

Facebook is the 2022 version of what we once enjoyed in the yearbook or the high school annual. Except statuses are never updated, re-touched professional photos don’t wrinkle, what you were in 1972 is what you remain. Published with your 1970s style, pursuits, personality, achievements forever bound at the age of 17 or nearly 18 or fully 18. Old yearbooks are historical markers – the year in photos – the year in black and white. Today they serve as memory tools, something to clear the cobwebs and fuel the ruminations. Why have I kept them? The high school years I remember are a long dark tunnel of striving to be myself and pursue my interests but being confined at every turn by boundaries I was not allowed to cross; parental boundaries, personal boundaries, insecurities, popularity contests for which I had no prerequisites. Yet, I hang on to these tomes. 1970, 1971 and 1972. Frankly, I find them inspiring. Not the individual photos, oh no. Not the ballpoint pen inscriptions, though two or three of them were authentic, sincere and custom. The memories that stay with me to this day are the snippets of literature, poems, song lyrics – the prompts that set the stage for the journalistic layout of each volume.

Tiger 1970: Moving On

Like a long, lonely stream I keep runnin’ towards a dream, movin’on, movin’on.

Like a branch on a tree I keep reachin’ to be free, movin’ on, movin’on.

Cause there’s place in the sun where there’s hope for everyone,

Where my poor restless heart’s gotta run.

There’s a place in the sun and before my life is done,

Got to find me a place in the sun.

A Place in the Sun Ronald Miller, Bryan Wells (1966)

Do you remember the emotion? Do you remember the angst? Do you remember the feeling of being heard and understood, wrapped in a hug by words? Do you remember the need to belong? And the comfort of knowing there was a place for you? I do!

I was sophomoric, emotional, hormonally vulnerable and the words hit me like a ton of bricks. Oh, I had heard the song before. But here it was. In the high school annual. Chosen by a yearbook committee I had never met and they understood!

Tiger Seventy-two:

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.

As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and ignorant; for they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons…

If you compare yourself to others you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself…

Keep interested in your career…

Exercise caution in your business affairs… From Desiderata, Max Ehrmann (1927)

Even though I was a fan of literature and a consummate reader – particularly when I should have been doing my homework and carving a place for myself in academia – I had not, to that date encountered Desiderata

The impact was huge. At a time in life I could rarely think of with any placidity. From years of comparing myself to others; first chair, second chair, highest soprano, lowest alto, most virtuous, worst kid on the block, law abiding hedonist, fair maiden or cuckold, jilted sweetheart; came this gem of advice for a life well-lived. I took it as seeing into the darkest needs and recesses of my soul. I found the printed plaque. I nailed it to the wall. But I rarely stood and read it. More often, I returned to Tiger Seventy-two where I could savor the scent of the book binding and read the prose poem traditionally. And gradually over the years as I bucked the inevitable challenges of relationships – both business and social – I turned the pages and aged gracefully (I hope) with the other members of the Class of ’72. I read penned inscriptions, some insipid and false and some personal like this from a favorite music teacher, “…students who feel and enjoy as you do are rare.” Gradually I came to feel at peace with my past and God as I understood God, to feel like I truly was a child of the Universe no less than the trees and the stars. And to know that at least one or two other persons actually “got me” and understood who I was and who I was meant to be.

399 of us, regardless of any other shared background or similarities were thrown together as the Class of ’72 by a collection of Jerrymandering statistics known as transportation boundaries, classroom capacity, and baby boom. Therefore, we have a shared educational experience of one to twelve years that causes us to meet every decade or so – and particularly this 50^th year – for a thing called a reunion.

“And gay lustiness will give way to age and truth” Tiger 1971, Janet Schwietert, Tiger Tales 1967.

I planned a mini adventure wherein I rose at dawn, pulled on my board shorts and shirt and put the kayak in the water, heading upstream to Oxbow preserve. Along the way I sited a big lumbering cinnamon bear on a sandbar, seven geese swimming, ten ducklings and a momma duck out for a morning gander. Returning home, I called my 90-year-old dad. He informed me that my brother -at that very moment – was winging his way to the Artic Circle – presumably to explore and observe and capture photos. Now that is an enviable adventure! 

My roommate – the wilderness ranger, rose before dawn the next day, left the house in her Forest Service uniform, drove the agency truck to Silverton where she loaded 900 pounds of hay onto the vintage narrow gauge train that’s been chuffing through the wilderness for more than a hundred years; added panniers of tools and a 70 pound backpack, rode shotgun (without the shotgun) back to the Chicago Basin flag stop where she met two team members to unload the hay needed to feed the mules -beasts of burden who schlepped in the explosives. For the next three days they (the humans not the mules) slept in scout tents, planted explosives; communicated by satellite with emergency rescue helicopters, guarded unsuspecting hikers from entering the danger zone and pushed plungers on explosives gained through specially arranged permits to clear out the rock fall and avalanche log jams; cross-cut and cleared the resulting fallout; tidied up the whole process like they had never been there and caught the train back out to civilization. All so that the Continental and Colorado hikers can stay the trail and leave the wilderness untrammeled. That too is adventure. Choose your own. Adventure. Make it a good one.