Happy 2015 to all! The holiday season sort of got in the way of keeping on with the blogs, but I am back. I have been thinking as to whether I have said all I have to blog about. The reunion is a still recent and still pleasant memory. I have re-told some of the highlights and remembrances that stick in my mind, and a small amount of conversation has resulted, though not as much as I had hoped. I don’t want to run some of those thoughts into the ground, and I certainly do not want give the impression that I obsess on the past or have nothing else to do. I do. But here goes.

Old stuff! You received the email asking for orders for the reunion booklet. It is time to get that to the printer, even though the CD in digitized form is not ready because I have some technical questions for which I have not yet found answers.

New stuff! As I was mulling over those questions, I had a suggestion from Doug White to put up a Jeff Class of 54 page on Face Book. I had thought about this several years ago, but I am not a Face Book devotee and I did not pursue it. I think Doug is looking at setting one up. Will keep you all posted.

Class facts: Over the years, I have collected a lot of files from earlier reunions and items from classmates. By admitting this, I let you in on a secret that I keep stuff and don’t throw away as much as I should. In working on the introduction to the class history, I looked through some old files. These were typewritten, mostly by Kay Matteson Gregory. As I get time, I will try to scan some of it in and reproduce it here.

Other stuff! On a somewhat regular basis, classmates send along items to the jeff-54 mailbox. Some have the mistaken impression that these communiqués go to the entire class, but that is not so. Only I see them, and I don’t forward them on. However, some catch my attention, and I think that perhaps readership can be widened by including on here. With that lead-in, does anyone remember those awful English classes where we read poetry and tried to explain what the poem meant? I do readily confess that I was never even close to guessing what the poet was getting on about. “It’s all Greek to me,” could not have been a more accurate statement in my case. I even once bought a collection of poems by Robert Frost but also confess I opened probably once 40 or so years ago.

Yesterday I had an email from Rudy Alvarez, aka Professor Emeritus of Sociology Rodolfo Alvarez, UCLA. It contained a poem from Poems on the Underground. According to Wikipedia, Poems on the Underground is a project to bring poetry to a wider audience by displaying various poems or stanzas on advertising boards across the London Underground rapid transit network. If you want to know more about this subject, Google Poems on the Underground. An overly long into to the poem, which I somewhat better understand than what we did at Jeff.

Sometimes

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,

From bad to worse. Some years, muscadel

faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail,

sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;

Elect an honest man; decide they care

enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor.

Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go

Amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.

The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow

That seemed hard frozen; may it happen to you.

Sheenagh Pugh (bl 1950)