Glendale Adventist Academy - Class of 1959: May 2008

Where We Started

The first and last day must have started the same way - with a school bell ringing. The details have disappeared in my memory. I don't recall what I wore or what I had for lunch or what I did that first day in 1967 or that last day in 1979. But knowing what I know about early September and mid-June in Southern California, I assume that both days were dry, hot and smoggy. It's odd: two days separated from each other by twelve years are equally hazy in my memory. But these are memories of times that passed away long ago, and in their afterlife, these ghostlike memories haunt a part

of my brain reserved for defining moments.

In a sense there is nothing more fundamentally defining of us than what we experienced between our first day of first grade and the last day of senior year. This is my 20th reunion year. But for every alumnus here, it is a reunion year, a time to recall that dramatic epoch that set the trajectory of our lives. Sometimes we recall the past and want to relive it. Sometimes we shudder and recoil at the thought of what we were, what we looked like, what we did. But where we started defines us. It has brought us here and influences where we're going.

As I've been thinking about this reunion, it has struck me how fast the last twenty years has slipped by, like a VCR stuck on fast forward. It's a cliche that life is short - but it is, it truly is. Just as you get a few things figured out, around my age, you're already getting bald and gray. Life's a cruel and mocking game. Once you grasp a few of the rules, guess what? - the game's practically over.

But what has struck me most in thinking about the past is that there is no clear line between the me of then and the me of now. In fact, we are always moving toward something in the future with only a hint of a clue as to what lies ahead. We're adults but we still get scared, goof up and struggle. Sometimes our misguided youth doesn't look so different from our misguided adulthood. There are things to learn from "where we started." When I exercise my ever-weakening capacity to recall ancient events in my life - when I try to visualize that first day of first grade - my mental image is like one of those flashback scenes in a movie - it's blurry at the edges and the image is a bit shaky, as if filmed with a hand-held camera. I remember that my mother and I came to the west door of Mrs. MacDonald's first grade room in what at the time was the newest building on campus. At the door we met kids I'd gone to kindergarten with. Some of them were children of people my mother went to school with here at Glendale Academy.

I assume, based on pictures of myself from that era, that before coming to school my mother had applied a thick styling goup to my hair and had combed it back, parted on the side. I remember that hair goup well. All you men who grew up before the 1970s remember that hair goup. It was a smelly, sticky concoction - part jello and part super glue. I used it daily (except on weekends) from the first through fourth grades. The goup made my hair congeal into a solid mass. I looked a little like one of those statues of Bob's Big Boy, but without the huge belly. I spent the next twelve years at this school. I still live only two blocks away. My wife has taught here for nearly

ten years. And my daughter is the third generation from our family to attend. Seems like most of my life has been spent in this little canyon. There's a sense in which this little canyon is the foundation of all our lives. It lurks in the background of our memories. Of course we change, we develop over time, but there is a fundamental way in which our values and meaning have been created by our formative years here at Glendale Academy.

They were days of beauty untarnished by age, the promise of endless progress in the future, an unhurried, seemingly eternal now that enveloped us in an unreal time warp in which time passed, but nothing got old. In the famous 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians, Paul reflects on his relation to childhood: "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child. I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things." Not to disagree with Paul, but do we ever "put away" all the things of childhood? We do put away some things of childhood, or at least I hope we do. I haven't wet my pants since the Johnson administration - and I trust that I won't again until extreme old age. But there's another way in which Paul's comment can never be

literally true. We never put away childhood completely. Our essential self is formed early in life and is forever connected to the experiences of youth. In this sense, our childhood, particularly that portion of it spent at school, establishes broad themes to be played out in our later life, themes of past, present and future. What I'd like to suggest in this talk is that no great chasm separates our past, represented by our days at this school, from our present and future. Perhaps the best way of putting it is to quote poetry:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

I first read these words of the poet T. S. Eliot when I was in ninth grade. They are from a lengthy poem entitled, "The Four Quartets," which is a reflection on one's relationship to the past, present and future. I read the Four Quartets over and over in high school. I can't say that I fully understood what the lines meant, but they had a song-like rhythm, and they seemed profound - words like time, past, present, future. I've come back to those words now that I'm older. I have a better understanding of their meaning. I think the meaning is that the time in our life is not strictly linear, moving from point a to point b in a neat progression. The past and future swirl and curl around us. We live in the present, but take from the past as we try to make educated guesses about the future.

So let's think about our past a bit. That's what we're here for. Most of us remember our past in short vignettes. I vividly remember a few scenes from that first grade year and the other years of elementary; they stick in my mind for no particular reason. Mrs. MacDonald spanked Lori Baur's hand hard with a wooden ruler for some infraction of the rules - I don't remember the infraction, I don't remember the rule, but I remember the punishment as if it were yesterday. In the first grade we took naps after lunch on little rugs that we stored on shelves at the back of the room. I remember mine was a cheap shag rug, a pea soup green bath mat. Remember when the elementary school would watch nature films in the old chapel on Friday afternoons.

First grade was also marked by my first conflict of personal identity in the form of passionate feelings for a girl. At least they were passionate by first grade standards. To spare her dignity, I'll leave her nameless, but she had blonde hair that still seems to shimmer in the afternoon light as I mentally glance over at her across the rows of first grade desks. First grade was the year of my first kiss - actually more like a football tackle that ended in an awkward lip-to-cheek encounter. I remember being embarrassed to the core for liking this girl. But I really did like her, and I couldn't exactly control that. As if to increase my discomfort, a classmate, I think it was Rhoben Dalusong, took a marker - with amazingly indelible ink - and wrote in big letters at the top of the stairs leading to first terrace, "Karl loves so-and-so." To me the letters seemed the size of the Hollywood sign. Everyone in the class would pass by that sign each day and kids would tease me. Perhaps the better word is "torment." Kids tormented me for the next six years. This was my introduction to being embarrassed about certain aspects of myself - an uncomfortable division between the way I was and what the world thought of me. Perhaps some of you had similar experiences in early elementary.

Even now I occasionally feel that same conflict. But when I think back on how trivial that experience and other similar experiences of discomfort were, it actually helps me put current issues in perspective. From the vantage point of high school, the difficulties of elementary school looked minor. From college, the problems of high school appeared to be surmountable and survivable, and so on. And what you discover is that no period is without problems and difficulties, and that you can not only survive them, but grow through them.

It's only been twenty years, but 1979, the year I graduated, seems downright primitive by comparison to today. Before voicemail, e-mail, and fax machines. Before people drove SUVs or played CD's, DVD's, home VCR's, cam recorders. Before people surfed the Net with pentium processors. Before anyone thought of the Y2K problem - in fact, when I grew up was when somebody should have been thinking about the Y2K problem. This was back when guys wanted their hair long and nobody pierced anything except their ear lobes - and even that was forbidden to good Adventist kids.

I'm astonished at how things change, and reunions are certainly the time for reflecting on change. Remember the Glendale Academy press, right at the corner of Kimlin, just south of the Ad building. And remember how the road used to pass along the front up to the gym? Remember the big concrete bench in front of the library donated by some graduating class? I sometimes wonder what happened to that big bench, and all those wooden chairs in the old chapel. Remember the ugly green drapes in the chapel? Ah, the great ad building, that creaky old firetrap of a building, with the letters "GUA" spelled out in gray and black linoleum at the front entrance. This new building is nice, but it lacks the character, a certain hideous charm, that only the ad building possessed.

Remember Saturday night movies in the gym? This was before Adventists went to theaters. Movie theaters, of course, were the habitats of the devil. Your guardian angel would wait outside if you entered a theater. So Glendale Academy safeguarded our souls by taking the movies out of the playground of the devil and showing them in the playground of high school kids - the gym. What I remember most about Glendale Academy was its distinctly religious aspect, which is fitting since it was a denominational school. This school attempted to instill religious ideas that were to guide our lives. For many, religion was a positive part of the past. Others have left the denomination, some have ambivalent feelings about it, none of us is without an opinion about it.

Humans have a tendency to remember the bad and forget the good. For example, we remember the punishment, not what the punishment was for. We remember criticisms, but forget compliments. The same applies to our recollection of religious instruction here.

I, for one, tend to recall a great deal of religious instruction that was, charitably put, less than logically compelling. I went to music camp at Pine Springs Ranch all four years of high school, and I can remember that each year we had the same tired, inconclusive, and largely irrational discussion about whether rock and roll was all right to listen to. These debates descended into such mindless topics as whether syncopated rhythm was inherently evil. Music issues were big, very big. I even remember a high school science teacher seriously suggesting to me that perhaps the devil's greatest means of drawing us into his corner might be through the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Catch this argument. It's admittedly, a creative argument. An utterly paranoid and childish argument, but creative nevertheless. This teacher speculated that Bach was the perfect vehicle for devilish deception precisely because his music is so great, so religious-sounding. What better way to package evil than in the cloak of goodness. But it's ridiculous. If the devil is so masterful as to make the bad look good, and does so in such a way that we cannot recognize it, how can a reasonable, good god blame us for being taken in? What would happen to the notion of free choice and responsibility if those choices, based on the best available evidence, were never reliable? And if what appears to be good is really bad, haven't we essentially undermined any attempt to make reasoned moral decisions?

This argument, which is typical of a whole genre of perhaps well-meaning but misguided argument, was the result, I think, of an overly narrow, insular mentality that viewed all outside influences as somehow evil. We didn't study the very things that could have remedied such narrowness - literature, philosophy, history, political science, the social sciences. We only read books published by our presses, thought thoughts ordained by the official thought ordainers - in short, we tended to speak Adventist-ese to Adventists. The church was populated with people and ideas born of such inbreeding. And the occasional result of this Adventist religious inbreeding was like what happens when you marry your cousin: you give birth to genetically challenged doctrinal children. I remember sitting endlessly in Bible class debating whether certain acts constituted Sabbath-breaking. For example, we delved into that meaty question of whether eating out broke the Sabbath. This was a particularly difficult one for me. I came from a divorced family and I frequently spent Sabbaths with my father. But my father had trouble preparing a bowl of canned soup. So we had to go out to eat. I can remember after church going to the restaurant by the old Van de Kamp's bakery by the 2 freeway - now it's a Denny's. As I went into that restaurant on the Sabbath, I vaguely wondered whether doing so would keep me out of heaven.

In Academy, we had lots of discussions about the whole issue of sex, and I think most of us were left with the impression that something very evil infected sexuality. I felt the conflicts and guilt as early as elementary school. Like most boys, I thought about girls, but I feared that these thoughts were evil, even though they sprang quite involuntarily into my mind. So I developed a method for not thinking about girls, and for cleansing my soul after those occasions when I would think about them. I would walk around campus and pray, repeatedly, for Jesus to help me not think about girls. I'd repeat it and repeat it. Predictably, as soon as I would utter this request, sure enough, girls would pop back into my mind. So I'd start up the whole thing again. Catholics with their prayer beads and Hail Mary's had nothing on me. Adventism in that era inflicted a peculiar form of terror on the minds of young students. We heard about the second coming, having to run for the hills, not being able to buy or sell, the universal Sunday law - the whole scenario was enough to give me nightmares. I imagined that in the end my family and I would escape to some place in the High Sierra, and that we'd have to eat boiled pine needles and tree bark, and that men with blood hounds would be searching for us - those terrible, subversive Sabbath-keepers. The mere thought of this was enough to drop me to my knees to ask forgiveness for past sins - and I even wondered if I could obtain advance forgiveness, a kind of spiritual liability insurance, for all the sins I might commit in the future. This was all put into focus in third grade. I remember that Mrs. Simpson, my third grade teacher, read a story to the class. Many of you may be familiar with it. It was a dramatic account of last day events according to the Seventh-day Adventist scheme of eschatology. The story was entitled, "Now." It took several days for Mrs. Simpson to complete the story. But along toward the end, when the world was coming to its cataclysmic conclusion, I began to feel irretrievably guilty about being human and sinful. I can still remember Mrs. Simpson reading the final chapter of the story. I was sitting toward the right front of the class and my friend Rick Romeo, who felt the same way I did, was sitting behind me to my left. I can remember the afternoon sun filtering in through the west-facing windows of the classroom as I looked back at Rick. He was staring straight ahead, transfixed by a vision of his doom. For at least a few weeks after that story, Rick and I tried to live sinless lives. I don't know about Rick, but since then I have fallen irredeemably into the pit of damnation by my choice of profession: I became a lawyer.

Those of us in the 1960s and 70s remember the intense theological positions taken over jewelry and hair length. For example, when I worked on the yearbook, the art teacher had to meticulously paint out any jewelry that a girl may have worn for her picture before that picture could be published in the yearbook. They also painted out guy's long hair. I remember the picture of Dave Brunt, class of 1977. His hair was actually down to his shoulders, but in his picture in the yearbook, it appears to be nicely trimmed. We used to have intense theological discussions about competitive sports. Competitive sports were bad, very bad, at least that's what we were told, although nobody could ever make much sense of the assertion. Now, of course, Glendale Adventist Academy participates in competitive sports, which they should have been doing all along.

If I may be theological for a moment, I think what strikes us as funny or odd about these things, these great Adventist bugaboos, is that they do seem somewhat childish in retrospect. But our teachers and our past really can't be too much at blame. Understandings develop over time. This country, for example, was born on July 4, 1776 of a document proclaiming that all men are created equal, permitted the legal enslavement of African Americans for another 85 years, and did not grant women the constitutional right to vote for another 144 years. Misguided thinking is an inevitable feature of being human. And if we're honest, we've all held to ideas at one point or another that seemed unacceptable later. This is a product of our imperfect means of perceiving, our natural tendency to view things narrowly, our preoccupation with trivial detail. Adventist education in religious matters suffered from all these things. But Adventism, to its credit, is now encouraging a vision of god and the world in which the things of god and the things of this world are not so dramatically separated. Positions in the church change as understandings develop, which is similar to what happens in our personal lives.

Religion was unduly complicated for many of us back then. It became a morass of intricate and seemingly irrelevant detail. In that same Bible that was so often quoted for narrow propositions, there are broad statements that capture the essence of religion. For example, Micah 6:8: "What does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?" Or Matthew 22:37-40: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy god with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." That says it all. The teachings of Jesus focus on the encounter with God in love and how that experience should be put into practice in this world. Jesus doesn't care about trivialities like jewelry. He cares about compassion, fair treatment, justice, love. What does Jesus say about how to express religion? You remember the verses in Matthew 25: "'Lord, when did we see You hungry and feed You, or thirsty and give You drink? When did we see You a stranger and take You in, or naked and clothe You? Or when did we see You sick, or in prison, and come to You?' And the King will answer and say to them, 'Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.'" The enduring truths of religion are the simple truths. I said at the outset of these remarks on religion that we often forget the positive, and remember the negative. What we often forget amidst the sometimes amusing silliness of our upbringing, is the positive aspect of this school's religious training. We were taught here that life is grounded in an ultimate purpose, designed and sustained by god. This purpose is surpassingly good. Life is directed toward enjoying that ultimately good end-state. Much in this life can distract us from that progress - this is the notion of sin. Faith consists of having a deep hope, an overriding optimism that we will participate in that ultimate goodness, and that god has insured that we will obtain it. From lower elementary we progressed through the hormone-induced bi-polar disorder known as adolescence. We were immortal. We were the best at everything. Our parents and teachers knew nothing. We had grandiose dreams. I, for one, was planning to win the Nobel Prize in literature by the age of 25. Needless to say, I didn't meet that goal. We were delusional in this sense, but we were also enthusiastic and optimistic, qualities that jaded adults should try to rekindle. As adults, we've lost one of the greatest aspects of childhood - a thorough-going optimism and absence of worry. As an adult, I've increasingly come to appreciate the words of Jesus in Matthew 6: "Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. . . . Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature? . . . Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things." I'm at the turning point between youth and old age. A few gray hairs, among the diminishing numbers that remain. I can just detect the beginnings of a network of wrinkles spreading out from the corners of my eyes. I feel more fatigue. I have more interest in watching CSPAN than network TV. A greater interest in peace and quiet, a growing intolerance for the things of youth. I don't like loud noises or the rides at Magic Mountain anymore. I find myself detesting current popular music in the same way adults disliked the rock and roll of the 60s and 70s. I find myself thinking, for example, that the disgusting phenomenon called "rap" is just a big pimple on the complexion of music.

At my age and beyond, you think about how incredibly quickly time moves. I don't feel that old. I don't think I look that old. I don't have old ideas - except that lately I find myself edging toward, of all things, slightly Republican views, and you can't get much older and out-of-step than that. But I'm almost 40. Almost 40. I can't believe I'm almost 40 and this life, this future I can still remember thinking about in lower elementary when life seemed endless and the possibilities limitless, a life in which I would have everything I wanted and achieve great things - that future is now, and life is already beginning to crest and move toward its downward slope. An odd sort of pain grips you on a deep existential level when you fully feel the finite nature of this life. We tended to think of school as a preliminary phase, preliminary to the rest of life, to what really counts. You think of "being" something - a doctor, lawyer, teacher, salesperson. You plod ahead and suddenly you're there, the place you once merely imagined being. And you discover, having achieved the goals, that you don't feel particularly different, that your inner life as an adult is more or less continuous with your life as a child. You still make mistakes, you are still confused, you still lack answers, although you try your hardest not to reveal any of this to your children or your co-workers - and your spouse. So maybe school isn't really preliminary. It's preliminary in the broadest sense of coming first - something must come first. But life is nothing but a continuous process of gradual change in which there is no absolute division between who you once were and who you are now.

When we were young at Glendale Academy we viewed life as something to live and be enjoyed primarily in the future, the present was mere preparation for that world of adulthood, when we would know more, be in charge, have control over our lives. I don't know about you, but for me that's a great delusion. True, we know more, a lot more, about things and ideas, than we did at Glendale. But the more we know, the more we realize that there is no end of learning, or changing. Paradoxically, the key to the future is to live fully in the present.

I often come back to Glendale Academy. To visit my wife. Or to attend my daughter's school programs. Sometimes when I hear my daughter sing up on this stage in school programs or see her running through these history-laden halls of my youth, the images of our two lives intermingle in my mind, and I see myself through her. She is the future and the past in one. I think that happens to all parents - this coming together of past, present and future in our children. Parents want to live again through their children. We hope, sometimes so intensely that we have to mentally break away and think of something else, that the future for our children will be better, and that the quantum of happiness they experience will exceed ours tenfold.

But there is a deceptiveness in this type of thought. It is a deception that devalues the present and future through regret, through constructing a false and imaginary vision of what it would have been like had we taken this or that path instead of the one we took. A truly mature vision of ourselves and our past is one that accepts the whole of it, is committed to moving beyond it in the future, but is deeply satisfied with whatever we are in the present. I suppose this is a general way of saying what religion tries to say in its doctrines: that we are redeemed. I once read an essay by the philosopher Robert Nozick entitled, "The Holiness of Everyday Life," in which he describes how truly marvelous our present experience is, the simple yet overwhelming experience of the here and now, the everyday. I remind myself of that title every once in a while, that there is a holiness in everyday life, the here and now. I remind myself of that when I return to this place where we started, where some aspect of my youth, which seems simultaneously near and far, echoes in these halls, inhabits these rooms, runs with the youth of tomorrow. T. S. Eliot, the poet I quoted at the beginning, wrote something else in the Four Quartets. He wrote: We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. We never fully know the place where we started. There's a sense in which we are unknowable - we are never finished products. But it seems that the older we get as we walk up to this school, the more we become reconciled to the history that created us here when we were young and enthusiastic, full of hope and idealism, and without great cares, without wrinkles, without mortgages, without joint pain, without retirement plans and life insurance.

When we come back to this place, it's easy to remember the past. It grabs us, it envelops us. If you try hard, you can conjure up a few images of your youth. You can recall the tastes - some good, like pronto pups, some not so good, like Princess Loaf. You can hear the sounds, if you try hard. Mr. Judy's band playing in the room under the gym. I remember the sound was so loud in that little room - it was like a 747 taking off. You can hear Rochelle La Grone's chorale singing at the annual Christmas program. You can remember the smells. Mr. La Grone's biology room under the cafeteria, the odor of caged rodents wafting up to mix with the aroma of lunch in the cafeteria. You can see the faces. The inscrutable face of J. William Leary, the intense face of Ellsworth Judy, the competitive face of Miss Echols, the face that introduced kids to first grade for nearly 40 years, Martha Hegstead, the chiseled, I-can-run-from-Death-Valley-to-the-top-of-Mt.-Whitney-faster-than-you face of Dennis Parrish. For those of you here before the 1960s, the face of the seemingly immortal Katherine Spey.

You remember the faces that populated your youth here, faces of teachers, friends, your own face. Like me you may occasionally pick up an old year book and see your own face staring back at you, as if from another time, another universe. If you're honest, you'll admit that part of you wants to return to youth. As adults we tend to idealize the past, just as we idealized the future when we were young. You may think you permanently lost something when you left this place and went out into the adult world. But the freedom and faith in the future that we had when we were young - that's still with you. The you of then is here now, and if you try hard, very hard, you will rediscover yourself in this place, the place where we started.