Old Man Tell Me a Story

The following is a reprint of a letter sent many years ago from an anonymous particpant after a Memorial Event.

The Memorial was like sex with an ugly woman. When you first made the move it semed like the right thing to do. During the intercourse you were convinced it was your greatest idea. The next morning all you wanted to do was get the hell out of there and on with your life. Five days later, you find yourself looking for the ugly woman's phone number.

It's five days later and I found myself looking for your guys' numbers. Instead I found Toe's business card in my wallet. How it got there will remain a mystery. The delirium tremors are starting to subside, and there is hope that I can scale down the ten-step program to maybe eight.

As I boarded the plane from Pittsburgh I was looking to the future as the plane made one last sweeping arc past the fading colors of fall and my view returned to our past. I remember leaving Westminster each semester heavy with forfeited opportunities and forgotten times. Each mile through the meandering hills of Ohio brought a sense of loss for things I never understood. Each end back then was assured a new beginning. As I grow older, I have less confidence that each end will be refreshed. Still, The Memorial grants me hope for always finding a shadow of our past.

The fog is starting to lift and clrearing recollections mirror my mind, hued with subtle colors that can't completely sway the obliqueness. We did find the foundation of golf and we did immerse ourselves in the lost souls that counter the Pennsylvania landscape like so many forgotten sheep. We did fulfill our maximum of youth and slam head-long into cocktails we had unwittingly believed would be rationed. We did forget the forgotten sorrows making our present without tense. We did mock our own failures as if they were contrasting clothes worn by another. And we did, albeit from the dark side of the moon, define the light of Sigma Nu.

I am once again calmed by a new beginning as if a weekend of debauchery and decadent drunkenness can somehow cleanse the apparitions that separate my senses committed to bettering a being entrenched in false hope and sacrilegious vices. A baptismal of beer is still a new beginning of our past.

Old man, tell me a story!