Prologue
It is six days before Christmas, 2013, and I have just received a phone call from my best friend of, let's see, the last 60 years telling me that his childhood sweetheart, wife and mother of his eight children was just killed in a head-on car crash! She was my special friend, also, and is the second special person I know in the last month who was killed in a head-on car crash; both victims of careless, distracted drivers. I have practiced a kind of defensive callousness toward death for most of my life, beginning with the death of my father when I was nine. But this news is different; I am shaken, I am devastated. I don’t know what to say; I stammer a few condolences and then we hang up. I hesitated beginning this Reno High 55th reunion “blog” (as Al calls it) on such a non-happy note but decided that this experience kind of frames my experiences growing up in Reno. |
