[Jan: This one’s for you.]

An e-mail from our class representative informed us that, following the passing of our senior year class president, who turned out to be an avid duck hunter, his family had enclosed his ashes in a decoy and set it bobbing on his favorite lake with a brass plaque affixed requesting anyone who found it to use it for a season and then set it back adrift. I thought this a lovely idea by the family, though it seemed to me that, between global warming, toxins in the air and water, and feral cats, our feathered migratory planetary co-habitants had enough to worry about without our senior class president being used to kill more of them.

Our rep also informed us that she had seen the recent documentary about the celebrated film director who had been two years ahead of us. My only concrete memory of him is when he stood in Quaker meeting and confessed his sincere disturbance at no longer being able to believe in God. (A member of the English department, a conscientious objector during WW II, then stood to comfort him.) A friend who later followed the director to Columbia reported back that he had fallen in with an to-be-utterly-scorned crowd of those who wore black turtlenecks.

None of this could have been foreseen by a reasonable man in 1960.