We have this thing in Chicago called "The Irish Goodbye" and I used it last night. Well, I thought I pulled off a masterpiece of a Houdini, but as I was putting the car in reverse, Brian Elson and Tim Walsh asked me what the fuck I was doing.
"I hate saying goodbye boys and I'm doing an Irish goodbye to avoid them."
Two of the first kids that I met when I moved to Indianapolis told me that they love me and it was good that we spent time together...
The Class of 1984 out of a small Catholic high school in Indianapolis, Indiana jam packed forty years of catching up in a forty-hour period.
We reminisced about our time together, we honored our classmates in Heaven and we didn't bullshit each other.
Speck pulled out his guitar and played a song by Jason Isbell called "Cover Me Up.' He sang it to honor the last kid who just recently died. He was emotional, I was emotional, our classmate that spent the last eighteen months with our deceased classmate was emotional.
The whole fucking room was emotional.
We realized that all of us at one point in our lives had been broken. One of us, a couple of us.... shit, most of us have something stressful going on in our lives right now.
It was at Cathedral where I received F's, both in the classroom and in my character. All of us Cathedral Irish received straight F's that carried on in life.
FOUNDATION: FAITH, FAMILY and FRIENDS
Greg Bell did one hell of a job putting the shindig together. Many others chipped in to create a great weekend. John Marbaugh, Beth Lewis, Anna Lamberti and a couple others volunteered as well.
That is why I used a Latin phrase in today's Grabber Section. Magnum Opus means Great Work. Forty years later and the Latin and Greek Derivatives class at Dear Old Cathedral still pays off.
Many of us won't gather together again until 2034. Unfortunately, the odds are, a couple of us will have our senior year picture on the table of death and not on a name tag.
Speaking of the Table of Death, if that is even an appropriate thing to call it.... We must continue to honor those individuals by leading a beautiful life in their absence.
Let’s never forget that we once shared our last years of youth together. Because of each other we have turned out to be a decent group of sophomoric adults.
I got in my rental at 3:40am and pulled into the Divorced Dad District of Riverside, Illinois at 5:54am. I must make sure Betty the Green Blazer doesn't see the lipstick on my collar. I wouldn't want her to think I cheated with a fucking Nissan.
I think I'm going to meet my neighborhood buddies at the diner for breakfast. I'm going to cherish them more because I learned how much I cherished those fourteen-year-old kids that I met forty-four years ago.
...and I gotta water my flowers.
It is going to be a gorgeous week in Chicagoland. I put a smile on the sun today.
One last thing about the reunion... one of my classmates has eleven grandchildren and I have a daughter going into sixth grade next week. I better not get old, but continue getting older so I can make the sixtieth in 2044.
