| 06/20/08 11:12 AM |
#3
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Lisa Lynott (Carroll)
"When as a child I laughed and wept, time crept
When as a youth I dreamed and talked, time walked
When I became a full-grown man, time ran
And later as I older grew, time flew
Soon I shall find while traveling on, time gone"
We sang this song in choir during both junior and senior years, and it was particularly special during Sing-out our senior year. It suddenly popped into my head a few days ago and seems to have stuck there! I think because the reunion is this weekend. I thought about how, at the time we sang this, time really DID seem to walk. A week seemed like a year and a year more than forever. Those last two weeks before graduation seemed especially slow, lol. We heard older people say that there'd be a time when things would seem to move too fast, and, even though we knew in the abstract that they were right, it just didn't seem like it was ever going to happen that way.
But now it does, indeed, seem to fly. One minute it's Monday morning, the next it's Friday; blink again and it's Monday morning again. It seems like just days between birthdays and the holidays, instead of forever. The knowledge that it's actually been an entire quarter of a century since we stood on the stage the night before graduation and sang that, and then received our diplomas the next day and were sent off into the world of college or, for some of us, the even more adult world of work, marriage and family right away, is, literally, impossible to believe.
I'm two years older now than my mother was when I graduated. My own son recently had his seventeenth birthday and will be having his own graduation soon enough. Many of us have already had children graduate from high school; some of us are even (shudder!) grandmothers. And there's so much more to do, learn, accomplish, see, be. Before time is, indeed, gone and, given that we're already in middle age, I think we're all a lot more literally aware of just how little time there really is anymore. Heck, before you know it, we'll be getting ready for our 30th!!!!
We all liked to talk about what we were gonna do and be. We were going to write the Great American Novel, make the Next Great Scientific Discovery, compose Broadway musicals, design great fashions, etc., etc. We may not have done all or any of that, at least not yet. But we've still contributed much and made our own corner of the world a little better. And we still have a lot more in us to contribute.
Andrews may not be technically "Andrews" anymore. But, even though we're now scattered among many different states with vastly different lives, it still will always be "Andrews" to us, no matter how much time gone.
So party it up at the reunion and I hope to be able to actually make it next time!!!
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