I got sick a while ago

Oh, here we go. First off I am a member of the class of '71. That was a bit ago, if I must say so. It was and I will say I missed a large portion of this period for one reason or another. Time or material may have had something to do with it. Maybe, I didn't care.

The question of the fiftieth reunion came up and I wondered what that meant. It was off set, Covid, you know. I am a member of that class but I am not necessarily a member of that school. I went there in the twelfth grade and graduated. I met kids and some were important to me. It was fifty-one years ago. Oh boy. I began to wonder because I have noticed more and more people dying around me these days. If the same thing had been happening all of this time since high school, people had been dying but the space was more spread out. I began to want to know what was the reason why the deaths had occurred. Simple enough. when you wonder daily, why am I still alive.

Perhaps I was selfish expecting death to visit and not to ignore me as I made day-to-day major slips in the necessities of staying alive.

Going along willi-nilli and finding myself where I should not have been didn't seem to impress me enough to find other places to be. In fact, my excuse was that I couldn't find anything better to do.

There was a section on the Facebook page for my Class of '71 that by that time pertained to a memorial section, I perused it thinking that I don't know any of these people anyway so what the heck.

It didn't work out that simply, I did know some of them, I did know a lot of the people on that list. It troubled me that that was the case. I wanted to know why I knew that high of a percentage of the people that I went to school with that were dead and I was not. I didn't want to be dead, in fact, I am not sure that I should not be, I just wonder

I asked the Moderator, why are these people dead? I wanted to know, what had they died of or what had caused their deaths. I was told that that was personal, that, I was not allowed to know the reasons. I wanted, to know how I could avoid the fates of these people that were the same as I was as we were growing up. We were the same, the same age, the same fears, the same vaccines. What were we supposed to do, run, duck .and crumble, when the bombs were coming in?

Maybe not, the results would have been the same. Crumble seems to be a better end for me today than, burned to a crisp.

Death has been a part of the way that I have been forced to think, violent death most of it. The other kind I was only allowed to wonder about.

Those kids that I knew, though they were the ones that had fates that I thought I might have been too late to avoid I did want to know, I did want to try, to avoid. You don't lose a battle against Death you lose a battle to live.

I asked, and a response, under threat, was, if you don't quit asking, why they died I will cut you off.

The problem was the number of people in the list that I had known. These were the people that I felt had been important to me when I was seventeen, fifty-one years ago.

I thought, that I could do this. I looked at the names, I thought, Thom, Douglas, Sarah, and one name I don't remember. I do remember her hair bloomed way up beyond where it should have. She told me she wanted to be a concubine. To travel around the world. I didn't know what I wanted to be at all. There was nothing that I could have said. I could have said you are too beautiful, Sabrina, you are too sweet, you should marry me and stay by my side, until all of the morning suns have gone. She is gone and I can't know why. I had a friend, he was a cop. I didn't know his name, but we were close. We called each other Tommy, Depending on the day or which of us saw the other first, we were Tommy Roe or Tommy James, those guys were popular at that time. Hey, Tommy James, Hey Tommy Roe, were all that we needed to say to be completely satisfied that we had respected each other that day, we were seventeen and mens, we knew! It lasted this way. Tommy was An Oakland Police officer later on. We had an occurrence, one night. I was pulled over for driving less than perfectly. I rolled down my window, and heard, Tommy James, what are you doing driving like this? I looked up and it was

Tommy Roe, I said Tommy, I am driving home and I will drive as carefully as I am able. He said, Tommy, go ahead. I did and now I am writing about how I am missing some of my friends that have gone ahead. They left during the last fifty years. Shit, time passes and it don't care a bit about us.