Monday, June 20, 2011

A Slow Go but Undaunted

After a negative reaction to being located and a local brouhaha about blogging on it, I decided that neither experience changes the task at hand. Actually, I thought the blog entry had a very positive message to be taken from a very negative reaction. In the midst of all this, I got a hit from Dorrien Bayer Hughes about Pat McIlwaine Hafner, who is happily in Bloomingdale NJ and to whom we passed along the website and blog addresses. When I contacted Pat, I received this in return:

Dorrien sent me the link to our yearbook and I spent hours going through it- wow all the memories, all the people that are a part of who I am today, all those lost.  I laughed, I remembered, I smiled, I cried.  It is a shame-so many good friends that I lost touch with.  Thank you for hunting us all down.  Life has been a bit of a roller coaster for me but I am definitely at the top of it now and have been for many years.  For the past 9 years I have lived in Bloomingdale NJ .  Prior to that I lived in Rockaway NJ for 20 years. I have been fortunate to have Dorrien "Bayer" in my life as my best friend for the past 58 years - OMG!  I definitely would like to attend our "45th"  wow - and will accept the invite on line. 


Now that's more what I have come to expect. I don't expect thanks (it doesn't hurt to hear it once in a while, of course). The mission is to get people to realize what they are missing by letting themselves get separated from the class, and how much others are missing them because they too have lost touch. It is not just or only about the reunion, although that is the next  primary contact point where there will be lots of classmates. It is about the community of people that occupied Wayne Valley between '64 and '67 and the legacy of friendship and accomplishment that they left behind. It is about reconnecting now that the Internet provides such an easy way to do this via email or social network sites like Facebook, or the class website.

I wonder about how much we do know about where folks are. In the case of my wife's class here in Evansville, there was the official record from the school, 44 years out of date. Then a directory put together by the reunion committee at the 20th year, and that was pretty much it. Think of how many times you've moved or changed phone numbers or added an email address in the last 24 years. Even people who I thought we had a handle on are moving around and are busy enough that contacting the class is not the first thing on their priority list. It is like those old cowboy movies where the cowboys are moving along the trail dragging a branch behind them, obliterating the hoof prints they have left behind. I didn't think of it, and I've sure done my share of moving. But then again, my parents are still in Wayne, in the same house for the past 44 years. I  doubt we know as much as we think we know.

Even the people I have contacted in the last month or so are on the move. Tim and Chris Henneman are preparing to move to South Carolina from North Carolina to be closer to their kids and grand kids. Art Grahn just moved to Jackson, NJ from Wayne. Again, the nice thing about the Internet and email addresses is that they provide a breadcrumb trail so we can keep in touch. Generally, people keep their email addresses if nothing else. With the increasing use of cell phones and their only phones, people keep their phone numbers too with increasing frequency. It makes it more difficult to locate the numbers, but once you have them, it's great for continuity's sake.

So if you move, make contacting the class reunion committee part of your moving kit. Don't make us have to find you again!

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Not Everyone Remembers Wayne Valley Fondly

I suppose it takes something like this to realize that not everyone remembers their high school days with fondness. Victor Quinn just replied to me in Facebook after we found him and I messaged him to confirm his identity:

"Aside from the fact I have no idea who you are, I had no friends in that place and put it behind me a long time ago. I haven't even been to Wayne in 30 years. Anyone over the age of 30 who actually cares about HS is an idiot who needs to grow up" 


I simply replied that I didn't remember him either and now I realize that I didn't need to. Now I see that the years haven't been kind to Victor's personality and I hope that it has been kinder to his accounting business in Plainfield NJ. WVHS must not have had the same impression that it did for everyone else I have talked to over the past several weeks. In truth, I suspect that it was something other than WVHS that caused him to react so rudely to what must have appeared to be a total stranger. What if I had been a billionaire looking for an accountant? There's an opportunity blown. 


Well, I guess that we're all idiots, but I know for a fact that there are a lot of us who have made it life's work not to grow up. And I for one am glad of it. I am still curious about things not immediately in front of my nose and am willing to well wish people with whom I was once associated but are now separated, even by so many years. I am not rude to strangers, least of all to classmates, even if I didn't care for them back then. We are all different, and I hope better and wiser people than we were so many years ago. At least I would hope so and hope that Victor comes to that realization before it really doesn't matter anymore. And the unfortunate truth is that day is coming sooner every day.


Our class search goes on. I have just sent our class reunion committee a slew of information about folks we have located. I'm happy to say of them, the ones who are alive are living happily, in the company of their friends, children and grandchildren, most doing what they always wanted to do, and all are curious about people with whom we went to school. Most inquire of specific people they grew up with, special friends with whom they have lost touch and in some cases we have been able to help in that regard. The ones not alive are still alive in our memories and that of their family and loved ones. That is all the legacy that anyone has the right to expect.

So, to the Victor Quinns of the world, I can quite proudly and defiantly quote James Barrie and Peter Pan,"I won't grow up!"

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Fast and Furious and a Fantastic Story

Linda, my faithful Holmes to my bumbling Watson is finding people faster than I can call them (since we're an hour behind a lot of the East Coast folks. We're following up on leads of at least a half dozen people that look really good.

Dorrien Bayer Hughes just friended me on Facebook. I've suggested our reunion folks to her for friending. The strangest find was this: http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/5081902/detail.html. It seems that about 6 years ago, Scott Mattes and his girlfriend successfully resisted a violent home invasion in their home in Colorado. Needless to say, this is another lead we'll be following closely.

It's fits and starts. You find 6 possibilities for 6 classmates and 4 turn out to be completely off base, 1 sends you off in a completely different direction, and 1 turns into a magical conversation with someone you haven't seen for 44 years. Once the identity niceties are observed, and classmate status is confirmed, then it is a rush of memories, and the great thing for me is that everyone remembers different things because they each have a unique perspective on our common past, a different take on common memories and it is just a great moment shared over and over.

It's time consuming and frustrating and often daunting. Linda and I get in snit fits together when her ability to find exceeds my ability to contact. But the rewards far exceed such little problems. As I said in 1973 (I love it when I can quote myself) "He labors not who loves his labor." Ain't it the truth!

News Flash! Victor Quinn is located on Face Book and by his business in Plainfield, NJ! and the beat goes on..............

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Another Classmate Found

Anybody remember Bill Appel (not pronounced Apple)? Well, it turns out that he's doing well, married to Irene for some 30 or so years and living in Middlebury PA. I talked to Irene long enough for her to realize that I wasn't trying to steal anyone's identity and that my motives were completely innocent. Hey, I remembered how to pronounce his last name, didn't I?

I realized during that phone call that I was getting pretty good at jamming a lot of information into the very few short minutes that you have to convince people that you aren't a telephone predator. There are also still folks who don't have answering machines; then you have no clue whether it's a good phone number or not. They just ring and ring and ring. That was the case for Ron Elston. I thought I had a lead for him in Atlanta GA, but after several calls with no answers, it's probably wrong. He wouldn't duck my call, we socialized in the all school production crowd, would he? A variation - I think Howie Wilke is in Gilbert AZ, but the phone just tells me that his voicemail box is full and I can't even leave a message. Anything after that is just pure speculation. Is he a snowbird and Gilbert is his winter destination? Is it a wrong number? In these cases, you just have to wait and hope that something else breaks.

Dale Weber emailed me to let me know that Jeff Price died in 2002. I confirmed it on the US Social Security Death Index. Nov. 2, 2002. Sometimes, when there is no clue, it's because it is too late for clues. Such was the case for Madelyn Carr Tooker, for whom all evidence leads to her passing in August of 2007. Every time I find out such sad business, I feel my shoulders sag just a little lower, and my thoughts dwell on our high school days just a little more than usual and the march of faces of our classmates gone is a little longer.

But the search goes on because it is necessary, not because it will always bring good news. Rosalyn Pier is in NYC according to her brother on Facebook. There is also a whole cluster of folks who settled in North Carolina. Dale also gave me a lead on Richard Thomas which I will be following up on today. And yes, I'm still looking for Paul Wagner and now Eddie Boland. And I have leads on Sally Rosensweig and John Van Hoff and Bill Anderson. So if you hear anything, let me know. Any hint could lead to another classmate found. There is still much work to be done.

Monday, June 13, 2011

Two or Three a Week is Going Good

Every now and again, I get discouraged about my "Find all my lost classmates" quest. It just seems like finding 150 needles in the world haystack is impossible.  So then I take a little break and resume my activities with my wife's reunion committee. We're running a fundraiser - a classmate offered up a week's stay at his Orange Beach AL condo for a drawing at $10 a pop. So far, it's drawn a really good response. We're hoping to raise a grand out of it.

But the classmate search is a process of planting seeds and sometimes you reap rewards. As I mentioned the other day, using a truly arcane combination of people search engines, ancestry.com and good ole 411, we located and spoke with Dale Weber (as documented in our previous blog entry) and Kris Skaflestad both in North Carolina. Let me steal a page from my Reitz 1967 blog (reitz67.blogspot.com).

Just when I thought we had run into a stone wall with my Wayne Valley classmates search, we hit paydirt over the weekend, and I had a chance to reminisce with two more classmates, neither of whom knew they were lost and were both grateful that they were found. It seems nearly universal; very few consciously try to lose touch with their high school group, it just happens over time, day by day as life's demands and happenstance buffet you through the years. Whether by design or not, you come to a moment of respite and your mind starts to wander to the past, and high school days come to mind along with the inevitable speculation about this one or that one. Did they fulfill their yearbook ambitions; if they didn't are they happy anyway? I admit I've run into some classmates who .... Let's put it this way, just like my old classmate (I don't seem to have any other kind), Dale Weber being listed in the dictionary under smart ass, there are a few that can be found under hateful and paranoid. "I don't remember you. Who exactly are you and why are you contacting me and why do you want this information?" I know that this is going to cause you to have to contact your federal witness protection program handlers, and you'll probably have to move again, but your high school classmates are curious about how you turned out. Now I can tell them without you having to provide a lick of information.



On the encouraging side, as our 45th approaches, I've seen more and more classmates looking for their classmate friends and I'm delighted to be able to provide some guidance and information. The more people start looking around, the more will be found. The more that are found, the more that will attend. The more that attend, the better the event will be and that's my selfish wish.

Saturday, June 11, 2011

Another Good Day

Aside from the day my first wife died and the day of our housefire, I try to find something good in everyday. After some protracted looking around, we found Dale J. Weber. I don't know how many of you remember him. I did, and it was a real blast talking with him after 44 years. The thing I remember most about Dale, is that for me, he was the prototypical smart ass. If you looked in the dictionary for a definition of smart ass, Dale's photo would be there. Dale could never stop wisecracking and almost always had to have the last word and it drove the teachers crazy, especially those who had decided that discipline and control were going to be their hallmark. Needless to say, the phys. ed teachers hated Dale the most. It turns out that Dale spent most of his life relatively close by Wayne in the overhead door business. He's now living comfortably in a gated community in North Carolina. He has bamboozled some of his neighbors into thinking that he is a New Jersey goombah and is in witness protection. Still a smart ass, but true to himself. We talked until Amy, his wife of 42 years, started complaining that dinner was getting cold. I'll be passing his contact info along to the committee.


Dale is on Facebook, as it turns out. But there are about 50 Dale Webers on facebook. I've emailed him to friend me because there are fewer Milton Yuans out there.


Speaking of witness protection, some of our classmates are so hard to find that it may very well be that they are in witness protection. On the hunt for Sue Stumpf, Kris Smock and a few others for whom we have developed leads. 


So I find myself in Evansville, Indiana. My website business continued for a little while but eventually, people you do business with want to see you. Websites were starting to become commodities too. Everyone seemed to have a nephew or grandson who wanted to try their hand at building websites. No one seemed to want to pay real money to someone who actually knew what they were doing. I went back to school, at 56 years old to get my teaching credentials. Boy, the University of Southern Indiana scratched their heads when they saw  the Pass/Fail entries in my Yale transcripts, but they enrolled me and I went 4.0 and got my secondary school license after doing the whole student teacher thing at my wife's high school. I may have been a subversive in this "educate to take the test" environment. There is definitely no love of learning going on around here right now. I also found out that there is no demand for 56 year old teachers no matter how well they can teach the materials. Ironically, I modeled myself after Dorothy Tunis, and Al Piaget, and Maggie Erdman and Bob Ruffing and Charlie Tucker. They didn't teach so that you could pass a damn test. They taught because they wanted you to love literature and words as much as they did. The only job postings at the school board were written with someone in mind. I needed to do something for income. Savings wouldn't last forever. Someone suggested that I try private security. Sure, why not. I never tried to do anything that I didn't end up doing reasonably well. 6 years later, I'm a supervisor considering retirement while working on my wife's reunion committee and searching for Wayne Valley alumni and writing two blogs regularly.


I was talking with Weber about the old "if I had it to do over" and the "if I knew then what I know now" gigs and we both come to the conclusion that if we could have done anything different with our lives, we would have, or we would have been different people than we are now. The thing is, we're both pretty happy the way we turned out, and any regret is already water over the dam. I'm happy with my life here in Evansville. I always wanted to end up in the Midwest where things were a hair slower and things didn't seem quite as urgent as back East. and there is something about Evansville people that I have really come to appreciate. I just blogged this on the Reitz67 blog:

The point is that Evansville people seem to remain Evansville people even though they are living somewhere else. Everyone seems to know everyone else's parents, alive or gone, or brother or sister or niece or nephew or even more importantly, who got married to whom, and even more in most cases. To me, this is part of the magic of Evansville, part of the magic of the Westside in particular. For the travel weary, for me in particular, Evansville and the Westside have become my home. I know without being told, that not being born here, I'm not a genuine Westsider, just a pale imitation. But I'm trying, and I have come to appreciate those qualities that distinguish Westsiders and Evansville folks too. What other small city can raise a million bucks at the drop of a hat when a disaster strikes? or do it regularly for MS or Reilly Hospital or dozens of other equally worthy causes?

This town is special to me, and for those of you in the class who were born Westside people, you're special to me too. You need to see yourselves for who you are, for who you went to school with and get over all the rest of the nonsense that separates you from the special values you grew up with. I'm not admitting defeat in finding my lost classmates, but I'm saying that it is a lot more difficult to find them because I don't have the special connections that your classmates have with you.


And so in the end, I sit here at my laptop and look wistfully at the words I have put down and thinking about whether Dorrien Bayer Hughes is really in Newfoundland, NJ and wondering why she has a fax attached to the phone number I have found. In between my musings, we're still in the hunt, making phone calls that aren't returned (Which is bad) and sending out postcards that aren't returned (which is good). Still trying to connect with lost classmates; Still trying to find the motivator that will convince all to attend the 45. Just talked to Kris Skaflestad Pacilio in North Carolina. It just goes on and on. 

Thursday, June 9, 2011

A Book about Going to Reunions

I'm creeping around Facebook the other day and get a message from Laura Macey, a friend request. Okay. Who's Laura Macey? I head to Embers and there are 5 Lauras in the book. The old friend request dilemma. Do I know you? Are you the friend of a friend of a friend who's friending all the common friends' friends? I message back and it's Laura Scilieri, of GAA and twirling renown. I remember GAA well, mainly from the rehearsals during which I manned the wood wind section of the accompanying band for countless hours. Friends. Of course. Then I visit her page. Turns out she has written a book and the protagonist is a person just like many of our classmates, struggling with the issues of going to reunion after a great many years. Interesting coincidence. I'm going to get a copy. There is no question about not going to 40. I was just too involved in other things that required my presence. There's also no doubt about 45. Not after all that has happened. Now 30, that was another thing altogether.

I was prepared to go to 30. My wife and I had gone to 20. We were still in Rutherford, so no big deal about getting there and going home afterwards. But my wife's annual physical didn't go exactly as suspected. Her heart doctor (she had an attack about 4or 5 years prior) heard an odd echo. A follow up revealed a small mass in the left upper lobe of her lungs. Both being smokers at the time, it was time to pay the piper. We were thrust into a medical world in which we were involuntary travelers and we were scared. Therapies in the late 90's were not so plentiful as they are now. The cutters ruled the day. Now, targeted beam radiation probably would have been used. The short version of the long story is that aspiration biopsy was inconclusive and surgery was scheduled and performed. The surgery was a success but the patient died. That was the end of a 24 year relationship. I was metaphysically catatonic for 6 months. I remember taking her remains out to the foothills of Colorado and spreading her ashes as she wished. In Evergreen, where and almost when Judy Gingert died in a car accident. I only found out about that later. It happens. It just couldn't happen to me.

A 49 year old widower, suddenly alone facing an uncertain future going through the predetermined stages of grief like reading a textbook. It was a strange time and I found myself trying to grasp at the past.  I only found out about that after the fact as well, from my future wife, who had lost her husband a month earlier. As a nurse, she had been trained in the psychology of grief and mourning. We stumbled on to each other on an AOL (that was all there was at the time) chatroom dedicated to widows and widowers all trying to cope and find a support system. Rebound? Maybe. It really didn't matter because it worked and is proving that good luck can strike twice. We married at the dawn of the Millenium and I ended up in Evansville, Indiana. I inherited a family, moved my web design business (it's the Internet, stupid, it's everywhere, or so I thought) and all was good in the world once again. I remember sitting in the old homeroom in WVHS just before the summer of 1967 calculating how old I would be in 2000 and wondering what I would be doing. It wasn't this!

What all this goes to prove is that nothing is guaranteed, nothing is for certain. When you are 62 years old, there is solace in the past, and much more time is spent in retrospect. Well, more for me, anyway. My personal experience with mourning certainly helped me put things in a different perspective.  With that time and the experiences I had here with my wife's class reunion activities (documented on their website, www.reitz67.com , how could I not make plans to be at the 45?  I have always felt that my high school days were some of the finest of my life. And the other thing is the sad fact that we're not getting younger, folks. That's what my continuing classmates search has shown. Don't throw away the opportunity to see your classmates at least one more time!

Friday, June 3, 2011

Deadly Summer and so the Story Goes

The hunt for classmates has slowed down a bit because on the Westside of Evansville, it's yard sale season. Yard sale, rummage sale, call it what you will in different parts of the country, it's still the same. Get rid of your junk so you won't have to haul it to the landfill or pay someone to take it away. We're doing this mostly for friends who have far more junk than we do, but we've got a better venue. Most of our junk got burned up in the fire last year, and we're doing our best not to sift through our friends' junk to accumulate more.

It's also getting hot as blazes here, after a real cool spell, the end of which was marked by some terrible storms that spawned tornadoes and severe weather and flooding across the Midwest. But that's how quickly things change and lives are devastated and people are suddenly gone. It's also another reason to get with the program and search out old friends and classmates. My search has found several who have passed away and recently too. The class committee is very careful about verification of such passing having gotten burned by angry families before. It's also hard to accept that our friends and classmates are gone except our memories of them. Here are some of whom I found who I believe to be gone: Bernice Alexander, Bruce Apter, Jim Avery, Al Butler, Mike Calderone, Eddie Cross, Eddie Mauriello, Catherine Nowak, Marylou Rudin. If you are any of these folks, let me know or if you know I'm wrong, let me know but all indications are such. It's especially hard to take because even though these passings happened over a long period of time, I've only found out in about a 3 week period. It's a big shock to find out like that.

It's undeniable. We've become our parents. We are at the point where health concerns and retirement are either upon us or at least within view. Others who knew us back then deserve to see what we have become. I know I want the reassurance that life has gone on, and has gone on well for the people I went to school with, and that's just another reason to go to the 45th, even though I'm 900 miles away. In my younger day, it would have meant "ROAD TRIP!!". Now it's more like a mission.

Back in 1975, we were moving into new digs in Detroit Michigan, just north of U of Detroit. Six Mile Rd and Livernois. 8 of us from the wilds of Nebraska, in the blighted industrial city. Looking back, it was crazy. We were producing political tracts, and I enrolled in a printing program at a local community college to formally learn the printing process. I ended up getting called into the dean's office and being asked to call a referred printer and getting a job because I had sucked the curriculum dry. I always seemed to walk in the back door, fully intending to do physical work and walking out the front door as a production planner and scheduler. (Shortly after, I began my tradition of starting a new job, getting in a raffle and winning. I won the Derby board that year on Seattle Slew.) Our political group's office was near Greektown in the downtown area  and so non working hours were filled with political discussion and Greek food. Before long, our little group merged with the Socialist Workers Party at a big conference in Oberlin, and they wanted a big chunk of my income. My wife was adamantly against the notion and when they asked us to move back east to New York, I reluctantly agreed. We lived in Queens, I commuted into the city to work north of Soho in the printers district. The commute was 3 hours a day. Changed jobs a couple times, and moved back to where it all started, almost. Ended up in Rutherford, NJ. My political activism days were over, my printing career was about to peak, and my commute was only 45 minutes. My parents were delighted that I was nearby. I went to the 20th. Worked in printing until the early '80s when printing became so computerized that it was only natural that I would migrate to that aspect of the business. By the time I got out, I was doing more computer work than printing. I and a couple of Taiwan guys my Dad introduced me to started a custom computer manufacturing outfit out of Fairfield. It did okay for a few years until PCs started becoming commodities and the margins eroded. I started working on programming and networking projects, let my partners buy me out and I gravitated to network integration and ended up doing web design. That was all going well until my wife tells me that her routine physical chest x-ray showed something. The world was about to unravel. It was 1997.

We didn't make the 30th reunion though we had planned for it. It was all something of a blur from that point on. It was a time of going from doctor to doctor. Somehow class reunions weren't high on the priority list. It's funny how life often gets in the way of our plans.

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Generational Differences and another chapter

I was talking with Nancy Gaestel via emails about my dad. He was recruited out of college by American Cyanamid (that's how we ended up in Wayne, actually. I remember standing in the middle of the woods off Berdan Avenue and my dad said here's where my office is going to be. I said "Sure, Dad") He was right again, as it turned out.  Anyway, he worked for Cyanamid for his entire working life and retired from there, only to watch it get sold, dismantled and sold off piece by piece by American Home Products. He retired at just about the right time. He'd ask me every now and again, "How come you're always changing jobs? You've had so many." And I'd just reply, "Different times, Dad, different times." Thinking back, I'd either move for other reasons than jobs, or I've had a couple of companies with whom I was really happy go belly up. As I got older and more high maintenance because of my work credentials, I got downsized a couple of times. I also got remarried (not my choice) too and that had me on the move again. I don't know whether it was Fate or luck of he draw or sign of the times, but I try to find a logic to the progression of jobs I've held. I'd like to think that there's a cumulative body of knowledge that I've acquired along the way. Thinking back, I know my folks got a lot smarter as I got older. Funny how that seems to work.

That's what is making the search for lost classmates such a challenge. We all have moved around a lot. Well, a lot of us. I realize that there are a fair number of folks, like Bill Shepperd, who stayed in Wayne for most of their working lives, but there are probably just as many who are like me. Wayne to New Haven to Taipei Taiwan, back to New Haven and then to Lincoln Nebraska.

Yeah, I met my first wife while tending bar. She was working there too at the time. Bartending wasn't a totally absorbing occupation for me and my friends so we got involved in a college based underground newspaper. It was the early '70's folks. Gradually we ended up riding herd on a schism in the newspaper staff, and where there was only one good feelings hippy rag, now there was also a more politically directed one as well. The Lincoln Gazette split and now there was the Nebraska Biweekly Dispatch. We did that every two weeks for over two years. Writing, editing, selling advertising, laying it out, driving it to West Point Nebraska every two weeks. I flew it off the press (grabbed the papers off the press and bundled them up) and brought them back to Lincoln where we hawked them on the street, Free or Donation. Not something you wanted to quit your day job for, but it was engaging and certainly honed my writing and put an edge to my political outlook. These were the Nixon years, and left wing politicos, us included, were convinced that we were bound for a police state.  It also got me involved in the physical manufacture of the paper. Somehow out of all of this, I became more interested in printing than newspaper work. When we were invited to join with a politically like minded group in Detroit (where there was a great community college printing program) we jumped at the chance and got our operation headed for Detroit.

At the time, it never occurred to me that as I was traipsing all over the countryside, that I was making it pretty hard to find me. That's how I lost track of Paul Wagner and my other high school friends. Some other college acquaintances had visited Lincoln but for the most part, I was out of touch. I suppose I could have been tracked by contacting my parents, but now, 44 years later, many of our parents are gone and aren't around to ask anymore. We use obituary listings for surviving kind, you know the "survived by his Daughter Julie, of Elkhart Indiana" as clues to locate folks, but you get the picture. You get 3 or 400 people doing this and it's darn hard to keep track of folks who aren't thinking at all about getting kept track of.

That is why it is such a remarkable achievement after so long for our committee to know as much as it does about us, and why it behooves all of us to keep in contact with them. I told Nancy Gaestel that my search for Lost Classmates was like my penance for being so footloose and unconcerned in years past. I've got a lot of time under the bridge to make up for...........