1956

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Actually, it was a noontime run. It was snowing, and there were woods. A Proustian pebble triggered a flood of memories. English 1, the privilege of hearing Robert Frost "say a few poems."

Whose woods these are I think I know.

They belong to the Parkway Commission. Does it matter? Why not stop and think? What do we run to? Or are we running away from? Thirty years out. What have we done with ourselves to make the world a better place?

The only other sound's the sweep/Of easywind and downy flake.

And an intruding jet plane.

How many times did we hear John Sloan Dickey say: "You are the stuff of the College. What you are, it will be." Back to Frost.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,/Andsorry I could not travel both ...

As a class we have our share of corporate lawyers, stockbrokers, money managers, surgeons, and psychiatrists, but we also have a number of general store owners, country counselors, general physicians, and ski resort managers.

I took the one less traveled by,/ And thathas made all the difference.

Did we go back to take the other road, or did we, while going on, come to another fork? Some of us left business for government or for the academic world. Some left government for business. A doctor became an environmentalist. We have a disarmament negotiator, a counterterrorist administrator. There are writers, actors, agents, directors, producers, critics in the worlds of letters, the stage, movies, and television.

Something there is that doesn't love awall .../Before I built a wall I'd ask to know/What I was walling in or walling out,/ And towhom I was like to give offense.

Oh yes, we have wall builders and those who do not love a wall. We graduated in the mid-fifties, a time of imminent military threat and foreign involvement. Those who chose a military career put their lives on the line to build walls, necessary walls, walls of security and deterrence. Peacemakers they, and others like them. Our complement of foreign service officers have both built and broken down walls. Walls of enmity, walls of alliance, walls of miscalculation, walls of understanding, rigid walls, flexible walls. Our ministers and teachers, stone by stone, dismember walls of ignorance and prejudice only to find them reconstructed when they turn their backs. We have friends in vocations we would not have thought of 30 years ago, drug rehabilitation, teenage suicide. Where there is a need to bring down a wall or to build one, one of ours will be present.

We speak of vocations. What do we do with the time, which we find increasingly difficult to grasp, away from our chosen fields? What can one do? "What can one man do?" asks John Gardner. "He can try." And try we do. How many Cub Scout overnights do we count amongst us? On how many committees have we served at church and synagogue? How many children, not our own, or adults have we tutored, watching together the spark of learning ignite and catch flame, we hope permanently? Whom have we helped, not for credit, not for recognition, but simply because help was needed? Have we not, each of us, in these past 30 years "reached out and touched someone"?

We run on through the snow. Our pace may be slow but we are in it for the long haul. The Loneliness of the Long-DistanceRunner? The irony of it is that we are not alone in the run. Not only Robert Frost, but many others have joined us in that run over the last 30 years. We run not to and not away from. We run for, and with. The silent generation? Nonsense; Quiet competence.

But I have promises to keep,/ And miles togo before I sleep,/ And miles to go before 1sleep.

15 Old Hyde Road Weston, CT 06883