A quarter century ago, when Virgil and I were both students at Northwestern High School, he was in the chorus. (I wasn’t — I never auditioned, for reasons that I no longer remember. Perhaps it was because my voice hadn’t finished changing and I didn’t feel confident about my ability to sing.) At their concerts, I sat in the audience and watched while he sang. Tonight, I was sitting in the audience again while a high school chorus performed . . . but Virgil was sitting next to me, and it was our daughters who were singing. Afterward, I asked him, “When’s the last time we were together at a high school?”
“At the class reunion?” he responded.
“No, I only went to the ten-year reunion, and that wasn’t held at the school. It has to have been 1977, on our last day of classes before we graduated.” We looked at each other.
Life has come full circle. Virgil and I met in geometry class in the fall of 1974, when he was 15 and I was 14. Now Ruth (age 15) and Alana (age 14) are both taking geometry. They’re not in the same class, but that scarcely matters, since they’ve known each other all their lives.
Where does the time go?