2/4/22 - Friday Forget-Me-Nots by Jim Silcott

Photo Caption: Sisters, waiting for that late bus! 

Dear Our Lady of Peace Family,

I hope that this newsletter finds you all well on this icy, snowy day. As of this writing I have no idea whether or not we will have school on Friday. Like you, I just wait to be told. Stay tuned! 

As some of you know, I graduated from St. Charles 48 years ago this coming June. We were a small class, the second one to be enrolled after St. Charles switched back to a regular high school from its five year experiment of being a high school seminary. Our class begin in the fall of 1970 as a class of 72. 50 of us graduated. 

Of that 50, five of my classmates are deceased. While that doesn’t seem like a large number someone pointed out to me that this is 10% of our class. That puts it into more frightening perspective. 

The most recent death from the class of 1974 was one of my best friends, Rich Lang. Like most of my class he was an East sider, graduate of St. Catharine Elementary School. His grandparents owned McNally Lumber where the St. Charles west campus now sits.

Rich came from a large family of which he was the youngest. His baby face made him perfect for the part of the young Winthrop in our freshman musical, The Music Man. He worked all through high school at the now closed Kroger on East Main Street in the heart of Bexley, a company that he continued to work for over many years, rising high in the advertising department. 

While I went to Ohio State and Rich to Franklin University, we remained close throughout college, meeting frequently one on one for beers and food at the Olde Mohawk in German Village, named for a time during those years as Tiffany’s. We had actually started having these conversations at St.Charles in the old upper chapel of the school where we would sneak away from class from time to time. He worked weekends with me at my family place, Deibels. In our many conversations we talked endlessly about life and love and our futures. We had our whole world in front of us. 

I got married first and Rich was my best man. When he got married a few years later, my wife was pregnant with Bethany, our second child, who was born two days after his wedding. It was thought that all the dancing we did hastened her arrival! 

Rich eventually moved to Greenville, South Carolina. For a time we kept up, but in the days before cell phones, telephone numbers and addresses changed and we lost touch with one another. Rich never embraced social media so he never had a footprint on the internet which made it even more difficult to reach out to him. We last talked about 11 years ago. Last week I read his obituary in the Dispatch.

Rich’s passing has hit me harder, in some ways, than the death of my parents. Even as I write this, my eyes tear up. Rich was always on my mind. I always wanted to have a reunion with him. I wondered if he had gone as gray as I had. I yearned to speak to him with the wisdom of our advanced age as a counterpoint to our youthful dreaming. 

Now that is not possible. In the days after I read about his death, I reached out to every classmate for which I had contact information. I have broken bread with two of them already. We have planned a reunion for the end of March down at Planks Café, another frequent meeting spot for many of us. 

My job as your principal working with your children keeps me young. Rich’s death has reminded me that I am not. But my conversations with him and my recent conversations with my other classmates are like traveling back in time. I suddenly recall so much from those years at St. Charles as we fumbled our way through Fr. Dunn’s Latin class, beat Watterson in football our senior year, went out for the plays to meet girls, and dreamed about what was ahead of us. While it is now half a century gone, it feels like yesterday, and if I don’t look in the mirror or pay attention to my aches and pains, I imagine myself at 17 again, the age I was on our graduation. 

Old men tend to get preachy and so I will not disappoint. Embrace your present, embrace your family, embrace your friends. No matter what happens, no matter where you or they go, your today will bring comfort to your tomorrow. 

Jim Silcott