Dedication Prognostication

It is going to be wet and cold and raw tomorrow, the day for dedicating the new boathouse at Kent School. I can tell you that I would prefer not to go there tomorrow. What a disappointment that it not be a pretty spring afternoon there.

I am trying to understand why I, why others, will attend the ceremony. There are no races to watch, nothing else to do, except shake hands with some familiar old faces, or the aging resemblances of them. We won't know one another all that well in most cases, but we intersect every couple of years for similar events--a race, a dedication, a ground-breaking ceremony--and we begin to appreciate seeing ourselves over time. The bond may be the school, the college or the sport and others who have shared in it. It is a shared experience being in the same location in close proximity, both time and space, through the same events. The intimacy of a broadly shared experience.

The common experience bonds us, for we often are quite different people, and this is what surprises me. Our politics may be radically different. On economic circumstances are often dramatically different, for many of these people come out of great wealth and still have it. Maybe that is a comfort to me, having significantly less to cling to and unemployed. Maybe it is the survival of the status quo ante? It is complicated.

At these events we talk, we ask questions, shift focus to the immediate event or person hoving into view, "Is that old so-and-so?" "I can't believe that's. . ." "He looks like he never changed," this said to someone with more shine than hair on his pate, more girth, or, rarely, less. The conversations are seldom very deep, more often short. We turn, we move, we circulate, and swing back to a few who we have made a connection to on this trip. You need to avoid finding yourself alone at a table, or sitting with someone completely arbitrarily. I usually do both, that is, meet new people and secure a place with familiar old friends.

And after a few hours, you go away, feeling emotionally charged by this group of strangers, having sung a hymn or shared a prayer in this beautiful place where you have spent so many hours in youth. The youth quotient has something in it, too. We are reliving our youth in these experiences, there's a yearning, a wistfulness in the air. These events are for the introspective, for those who find some comfort in looking back. Those who are afraid on their demise may not indulge in going back. They set their sails and always look ahead. I like to look back at my wake, to see the true course where I headed by knowing where I've been. If something is coming after me, I want a glimpse before I'm caught unaware. I want a good look all the way around me, not just straight ahead. There is satisfaction in taking the whole picture in, while we can. Looking around us, in others, we may catch glimpses of ourselves, our futures in the snapshots of our elders.