Fate and Finis

Good morning

Guess what! I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a very old man. And lately I’ve been feeling my age.

I read that the Czech novelist, Franz Kafka, wrote that the meaning of life is that it ends. Well, as I near that end, I’ve been looking back at the various periods of my life. The period of my grade school years, is one I wish I had the power of memory and of words to describe to you. It was a time you can’t imagine, it was so primitive compared with the world of the late 20th and the 21st centuries.

I entered the first grade in 1920. The school was in an ancient two-story brick building. The principal’s office was off a landing half way to the second floor. It was a terrifying place with a frightening smell of iodine, or linament, or something that signaled it was a place for scrapes and cuts, of stuff that burned, and bandages by that formidable old maid.

Read the rest of Fate and Finis at the HUU Community Cafe. The talk was given at the HUU Fellowship on December 7, 2008