Readers and writers blog

I gave the welcoming address at my 20-year high school reunion, the first one I had attended, and I was duly impressed with the momentousness of the occasion. My address was weighted with the American and world history we had passed through.

Now that the 50-year reunion is here, I no longer feel that weight.

Not that the importance of the span between 1958 and 1978 has diminished. Imagine if you will:

• Humans had walked on the moon. And not just the first two, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, but eventually a dozen men, all Americans.

• The president who launched America’s space program, John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated.

• There had been another war, Vietnam, and its inglorious conclusion had made World War II and even Korea seem like lost history.

• Two apostles of hope, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, had been gunned down at the height of the 1960s, a decade of social change that many of us thought had been too long in coming.

• But what seemed equally important to me — and to many others of the class of 1958 of Spaulding High School, Rochester, N.H. — was that we were now more than twice as old as we were when we graduated. At least, that’s what we talked about a lot, in one way or another, at that 20-year reunion.

Age now seems so far down on the list. And so, for that matter, do events in American and world history.

My classmates and I are now about twice as old as we were at that 20-year reunion, and yet I think age may be more important to those who have less of it and increasingly irrelevant to those who have more. I know I used to worry a lot more about death when I was in my late 20s and early 30s than I have since.

And now personal history seems more important to me than that of the nation and the world. Here’s why:

My 50 post-high school years started promisingly with college, the Army and then a marriage to a woman I had long dreamed about with love. But I was an unfocused collegian, an unwilling soldier and an unworthy husband. So 22 years out of high school, I was alone and, most of the time, drunk.

After another five years and a number of relationships, two of them ending in mercifully short marriages, I was living not in a house but in a small truck. You can read all about it in Adrift in America, a book found in the nonfiction category of our Works section.

Ironically, through all of this, my work as a reporter and eventually editor never suffered. And it was this work — I should say, work environment — that finally saved me.

In 1989, I visited a small daily newspaper in Kingston, N.Y., where I had worked in the 1970s, and I was captivated by a woman who now worked there. Actually, I was captivated first by her writing. In the paper that day was a story about a local Holstein farm that began with a description of black-and-white magnets on a farmhouse refrigerator.

I took a job again at the newspaper but didn’t stay long. I was still on the road and headed for more misadventures. But I never forgot that woman, and I got to know her better when I returned to work there in 1992, this time to stay.

Bonnie and I were married in 1997, and in the 11 years since, I have thought frequently about what a lucky bastard I have been — a bastard often in the past and now just plain lucky.

Bonnie and I will be traveling to New Hampshire on Friday for that 50-year reunion. It’ll be my third since the 20th. I didn’t give any speeches at the 35th and 40th. The 20th taught me that people just wanted to talk about themselves.

I think I will give a speech this time, but a personal one.

Today’s new offerings in Works

• Chapter 30: Manitou Springs of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Melanie no longer believes anything Gerard says or does, so he leaves her and her daughter, Wendy, and goes to Colorado to be with Ginny again. But that doesn’t work, either.

• Chapter 18 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. For the first time in the months since their divorce, Tess is visited by her ex-husband, Jason, a meeting of tumultuous emotions for both of them. And now that there is no longer Jason-and-Tess, she feels it’s also just a matter of time before there’s no longer Brian-and-Tess.

– Sid Leavitt