Today's Featured Biography

 
Douglas Barry

I had a vivid dream recently about attending our reunion and finding it divided into a series of seminars given by each participant. The dream never got into the details of the seminars, though I assume they were on the theme of what we've learned as we fast approach our 60th year. The dream turned nightmarish when it became clear that I was the only one who had aged. This is what I get for combining lobster and peanut butter ice cream,consumed during a vacation to Maine. If you want to remember your dreams, try my recipe. If you are taking a cholesterol-lowering drug, ignore this advice and be happy to forget things. Forgetting is the best advice I can give you.

Four things are maybe worth knowing about me at this point.

1. Though an indifferent and rather unsuccessful high school student, I had some memorable teachers who, mixed with our environment of the 60's, instilled in me progressive values that have made me optimistic about our collective future and place in the world. That activism twins with the optimism goes without saying.

2. After more than 30 years at one job or another, and having retired once with that all-too-rare invention called a pension, I have never had a boring day.

3. I've never gotten over learning about the death of former classmate Tony Woo. It's a good thing to remember people, to grieve for them, and to listen to the sound of "time's winged chariot hurrying past." And now today, when I registered on this site, I learned about others no longer with us. Tony and Gary Shupin, to name two, were very special peeople. Though still unformed at 17 years old, you'd have to have the feelings of a rock not to view and admire in them an abiding decency that should be more common than it was then and is now.

4. Out of all my classmates I'm only in touch with George Troy, Piedmont's municipal piper. We go back to kindergarten at St. Leo's in Oakland, where in Mrs. Casey's room we paraded in plastic capes, took naps on carpet swatches, and were shocked by the site of Fred Garwood being pulled, hysterial,from his mother's car each morning by a phalanx of nuns, priests, and the kindly Mrs. Casey. Did he sense what was to come? We went more willingly, and no entrance exam was required.

Congratulations on our 40th anniversary. Please drop by when next in Washington, DC.

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