Brad and Derek

These past weeks have been difficult.  Nonnie’s father, Reese Bradburn, died at 12:01AM on August 7th, while Nonnie and I were driving home from Albuquerque in a rental truck.  She flew to San Antonio from Boise, to be with the rest of her family.

Brad, the name his friends used, had an interesting life.  Raised in a coal mining town in Pennsylvania he joined the marines as a young man and was sent to China waiting to participate in the planned invasion of Japan.  The atomic bomb ended the war and probably saved his life; he visited Nagasaki shortly after the surrender.

After the surrender of Japan he left the marines while he was still in China and walked to the other side of the base and joined Civil Air Transport (CAT), and started his civilian career in Asia.  He married a Russian woman who was raised in China and they eventually had four daughters. 

After Civil Air Transport closed Brad went to work for Air America, which, like CAT, was owned by the CIA.  He was station manager in Hong Kong, which was where Nonnie went to grade school and high school.  After the Viet Nam war ended he and his family moved to the Washington DC area, then he moved to Oklahoma. 

Brad did great things with his life - a true member of the greatest generation.

August 21st was the one year anniversary of Derek’s death - the next day was his birthday - he would have been 35.  On his birthday we drank champagne at his grave site, released 35 helium balloons, and ate birthday cake. 

If time heals all things it hasn’t started yet; I miss him more than ever.

Fifty Years

Last Saturday night I went to my high school fifty year reunion, a fun evening with moments of joy, sorrow, regret, and delight all mixed together; emotions passing through me like pages on a flip chart.  Everyone wore a name tag with their name on it as it was in high school, and below their name their black and white graduation picture, so it was easy to recognize people once I saw their tag.  A few people were recognizable across the room, but most were not, although once I saw their tag I thought “of course.”

Since this was the first reunion I have attended, it really had been fifty years since I had seen most of the people there, and since we had over 600 people in our graduating class I probably didn’t know some of them even back when we graduated.  Some friends that I really wanted to see didn’t show up, much to my disappointment; I don’t know why they didn’t come, maybe they didn’t want to go back in time, maybe they have health issues - I just don’t know.  And over ninety people had died since graduation day, a long painful list of friends I wanted to see again, but never will.

One interesting thing to me was how people turned out, what they had done over the fifty years, what they had accomplished, what their choices and priorities had been.
I certainly had not seen the potential in some of my classmates; I didn’t see the talents that would make them successful in life, at the same time I had thought that being cool would guarantee success later in life.  It didn’t.

Some said the city is planning to tear down our high school and rebuild on the same site, an idea everyone at the reunion thought crazy.  The building and grounds are beautiful; they were the setting for the movie Mr Holland’s Opus.

I think most of us agreed that we went to high school in a more innocent time, before drugs, war, and assassinations changed America forever.  But our high school was very large and very competitive, and not everyone was a great athlete, or a scholar, or a great performer;  additionally we tended to form cliques, which were great if you were in but painful if you weren’t.  Probably the 275 classmates who attended were the ones who had good memories of high school and had the money to return for the reunion; the ones with not so good memories stayed home.

When I graduated I thought that my adult life would have two bookends; a beginning - high school graduation - and an ending - the fifty year reunion.  I thought I went to a great high school and I thought I had the best of all possible friends and classmates.  I still think that.

But I hope that this reunion was not the second bookend to my life - I hope I still have things to do, places to visit, and old friends to see again.