Michael Norton:  

Life I don't want these paragraphs to be "This-is-what-I-have-done-with-my-life". That's too much like, "What grade did you get?" in high school, isn't it? 1968, and everything we remember about it, was many years ago: wars ago, assassinations ago, attacks ago, and all of our individual lives ago, with all of our personal accomplishments and disappointments ago. That's a lot of ago's, whew! In those years, I hope a lot of us have discovered what we all wanted to know before we graduated: the answers, or at least a lot of them, to what life is all about. A lot of you who discovered those answers got to them when you were way younger than I was when I started to make sense of things. But finding out that s**t takes time! Open your yearbook, if it's handy. Look at us, frozen in time, extras in some yet-to-be-made Austin Powers movie. But an Austin Powers movie (that's right, baby!) is a fanciful look at the past, while we young men and women in the yearbook, we citizens-to-be lived our lives in the real world, the one we've shaped and given to others. I've opened my yearbook hundreds of times to show it to thousands of students; Mike the teacher, though by the time I became a teacher, my friends had settled on calling me Misha, from my days teaching Russian. And yes, there were so many students, I had to write 'thousands'. You should have heard the gasps as students saw our pictures. They were so surprised: we were so like them. There were even ¿generations¿ of gasps, since my first students, young men and women around my age, would go back home, raise their families and send their sons and daughters to California to study where I taught them as I had their one or both of their parents. In all these intervening years, I may have lost a lot of what once graced the top of my head, but little, I hope, of my sense of the grace of life. Actually, I've got a little more now, I think. At the end of my sixth decade, at long last, here I am, grace-of-life Me. Whew. Now, emerging as a Fully Fledged Person means ideas and ideals, standing up for them, being, in short, the citizen that our schools tried to prepare us to be. That's what life has wound up being about, not about how well I've distinguished myself from everybody else, the tempting 80s or 90s thing to do, but about the success at being lower case 'me' in the face of those many pressures to be happiest when overspending just as the folks next door do, the classic, skewed, Smith-and-Jones lives: the Smiths emulate the Joneses who try to be like the Smiths and so on and so on as they never-endingly outspend and outdo one another. Mike's life at 40 years beyond high school: no wife, no kids, not married to the job. Hard work in quite a few careers, yes. Partners, yes; my partner, yes. This about my first partner: three years after high school, I went to the Soviet Union, a trip that lasted 10 weeks and became the key to my move to CA, for on that...Expand for more