Class of 2021

Gaby concludes five years of life-changing experiences.

Friday 11 June. It was hot in Los Angeles. It was even hotter on the Drake Stadium track. And it was even hotter after opening an hour to make our way around the 400 meter track to the destination for the day -- the stage. Sounds like the opening lines from Dragnet, circa 1968, right?

All in all, it was a pretty terrific five days, leaving Appleton Wednesday at 9:30 a.m., arriving in LAX around 3:30 p.m., returning on the red-eye late Sunday night, arriving in Appleton five days after we left, with a 32-minute flight from O'Hare.

While in Los Angeles, we had a True Food dinner with Gary and Max Levine Wednesday evening. Thursday we visited Santa Monica again -- a coffee run and car wash for Gaby -- then waited for Diar to arrive, went on Gaby's final photo shoot on the UCLA campus, and finished with dinner at Gracias Madre in Beverly Hills.

Friday started with some walking, continued with even more walking to join Gaby at Drake, followed by lunch with newly arrived Jane, dinner later at the Broxton, and closing with a live band at Strathmore.

Saturday was the epic graduation even on Mulholland Drive, with several trips up and down the mountain, with a five-hour cocktail party from 3:00 to 8:00. I made the last drive up the mountain around 9:30.

Sunday we checked out and spent the day with Gaby, dropping Diar at the airport, getting lunch at Erewon, dining al fresco at a beach in Marina Del Rey, enjoying some last visits with friends at Duke's in Maibu, driving back to Strathmore via the PCH and Sunset Boulevard, before having our last meal at Tocaya, followed by a quick drive to LAX, courtesy of Gaby. Sleepless red-eye left at midnight and after two hours in Chicago, a quick hop back to ATW, then home.

* * * * *

Approching the end of my second year in retirement and the tenth anniversary of my kidney donation to Peter Hilton, I often find myself missing some of the elements of my college years, most of them from more than thirty years ago and fading fast. The more recent twenty years hold fewer great memories but even that period made me feel younger, more energetic and not just because of my aging process. In college for fifty years, I was long surrounded by thousands of students under the age of 22 and, among my colleagues, plenty of them under the age of forty and almost all of them under sixty. The "best things" about college included living the "life of the mind," having tremendous freedom with few scheduled hours, enjoying the theatrical pleasure of a class, and drawing strength and happiness from the youth and energy all around me. This final point -- the energy of youth -- is most pronounced these days, in its absence.

Of late, the treatment of most concern to me has been sunscreen and resting the ravages of so much sun on my fair skin stemming from both the number of years of outdoor life, and the walking regimen that has kept me outside for an hour most days for the past three years. So not only have I grown weary/bored of walking and its routine, I have good reason to cut back my exposure. My annual mileage goal, originally set at 1,000 miles for the year then kicked up first to 1,100 miles and then 1,200, I now want to trim the effective 3.3 miles a day target to more like 2.25 to 2.5 miles a day, which could get me another 500 miles this year on top of 566 miles to date, about halfway between my earlier goals of 1,000 or 1,100 miles.