Charles Johnson:  

One of my sons, and his family, are seated around the Saturday morning breakfast table each deciding what to have with his or her waffles. Bobby, my eldest grandson, glances my way. "Do you know, Opa...", he begins. "Yes," I say as I interrupt him, "I know Opa." Bobby's face goes all squinty with his smile. He is at that age where he gets the joke, and the point of my correcting his grammar and syntax. I smile back knowing that in a few years his smile will change to that eye-rolling that goes with thinking one is too old for that. "Opa, I like to come to your house on Saturday for waffles. It's a tradition." The other two grandsons nod in agreement more because Bobby said it than understanding what a "tradition" is. "Why are you going to your high school reunion?" my son asks. "What's a ree-you-yun?" asks Ethan, the middle grandson. "It's a party for old pe---" Bobby's reply is cut off by his mother's stare, that stare that seems genetically a part of motherhood. "Old people, Bobby?" I asked, completing his thought with a question of my own. Bobby is right, of course, a 50th high school reunion is for "old" people, and there seems to be a rightness about that even though too many of us take umbrage at those words. Yet, when I look at my grandsons, Bobby, Ethan, Isaac, and Adric I marvel at what they have taught me and that I have lived long enough to have learned it. Without them, coupled with my age, I would never have learned that I can get them to take on any chore if I will just wait for bed time to ask. I have learned when making a cake how much fun it is to lick the beaters...if I remember to turn them off first. I have learned from others over these fifty years, too. When I look back at my high school years I wonder what all the anxiety was about. This is especially poignant given that I have been married to my best friend for more than forty years. Oh, I know, many of you have been married longer, some of you for sure if you count the different spouses; and some of you have never married, or remarried; but I trust you have found your path through all of that. I could not have imagined then how it would be now. I met and married Adrienne (a Scot) in Amsterdam, and I have family far flung: England, Wales, Scotland, The Netherlands, Belgium, New Zealand. I say that not because there is anything impressive about it; there is nothing in this to bast about, but I say it to contrast with the sheer "here-ness" of my life in Lakeside. I never conceived of a life so different, so different from anything in my family, or my friends. Dorothy Ledbetter once told me that I would not find my place until the end of university. She was right in essence though it was in graduate school. Because Adrienne and I chose to live in mid-America, we weren't physically close to either of our families, and that turned out to be a blessing. We raised our children without the pressures of siblings or parents. Adrienne was able to help me grasp that a drawback of having had such anxious teenage years is that there's the temptation to believe that if only I could remember clearly enough all the moving parts and people of th...Expand for more