Monthly Archive: July 2025

I’m not gonna lie. It was more like, “Thank God we’ll never pass this way again.”

Just saying.

Recently, a fellow student posted elementary school class pictures of my classmates. These adorable “mini me” photos made me realize that most of the kids in my class had been together almost their entire lives, which made me a little jealous. But if I had been one of them, I probably wouldn’t have bonded with my BFFs and fellow “outsiders” who were also uprooted at fourteen to a new town. Meeting them made the experience – maybe not the thing of wistful 70s songs, but – so much better than it could have been.

Congratulations to my fellow graduates of Newfield’s 1975 class on this momentous anniversary we share with a sobering list of events that put this time lapse into perspective: the movie Jaws; the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (the wreck, not the song); the birth of Saturday Night Live; and the official end of the Vietnam War.

And special thanks to my favorite girls who made this celebratory weekend so memorable and fun, and who always “make me feel like I’m more than a friend.”

I remember thinking in my twenties when a coworker was going to her 50^th high school reunion: Damn, she’s old!

What goes around…

Postscript:
Seeing my fellow high school classmates in their elementary school class photos made me check online to see if I could find any of mine.

Hint: Those are my chubby cheeks in the second row. 

It took a while before we finally received an Amazon box the right size to fit George’s leg.

It had been sitting in the garage since he passed. It was in the house, but it was too sad a reminder of the loss of our friend.

Always the recycler, I found a place online that took used prosthetics for someone in need.

I took the box and the provided label to the UPS counter and asked for assistance. The guy at the counter shook the box a little and could tell there was not enough packing. When he opened the box, he looked at me.

“It’s a leg,” I said. He just nodded and stuffed some brown paper along the sides. It made me think, this guy has seen everything.

“What do I owe you?” I asked.

“I’m supposed to charge for the packaging, but don’t worry about it,” he said.

George would have turned 78 today. I’ve wanted to write about him since his passing in March, but I promised that my blog would be brief, and I don’t think I could ever be brief about George.

The recent (and very good!) Barbara Walters documentary reminded me of a world event that coincided with a personal crisis causing me to miss out on a once in a lifetime opportunity. The upside: It also left me with a very funny memory.

It was March 1979, when I found myself with a mysterious illness that would later be diagnosed as the auto immune disease, Sarcoidosis. I would fully recover with no serious long-term effects, but at the time it was shocking and scary.

I was working for the Secret Service as a seemingly healthy twenty-one-year-old when I was plagued by a weird array of symptoms. After seeing the White House physician, I was sent to Bethesda Naval Hospital.

This just happened to be the same time as the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty between President Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Begin of Israel.

Our Special Agent in Charge knew how interested I was in the historic event and had arranged for a coworker and me to attend the ceremony on the White House lawn. Only now I would miss it.

On the day of the ceremony a corpsman wheeled a television set onto the ward and set it up next to my bed. The nurse asked, “What’s going on?”

“The White House ordered it,” the corpsman said. “So she could watch the signing of the peace treaty.”

The nurse turned to me and said, “Who are you?!”

Little did I know that the White House physician had been calling to check on my status, so there was already a curiosity surrounding the young patient claiming to be a clerk for the U.S. Secret Service.