1.   From your long-ago English teacher
comes a question for tonight: Who knows
the opening lines of Dickens’Tale of Two Cities?

Yes, Hellerer? “It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times.”
Steal those words tonight. They tell so well

the true confabulation of awkward adolescence –
great days, lived in spades of bests and worsts –
your St. Joe’s days in the chaotic terrible-wonderful sixties.

As freshman, you saw an iconic president shot dead in Dallas.
By senior year, Viet Nam was burning America and Flower Power filled the air.
And you, in between, happiest when shouting “Beat Canisius!”

An age ushered in on Ed Sullivan with the storming of America by
the Beatles. “They’ll never last” said Flash.
It was the time of the first Mustang and the first color TVs,

Of Super Bowl One, and Cassius Clay morphing into Mohamed Ali,
of the lift off of Star Trek and Bonanza and Laugh In,
of Jimmie Hendrix and the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,

of I Have a Dream and two more icons shot dead,
of Light My Fire and Here Comes the Sun 

A sun with bunnies and flashes, squirrels, peeps and dum-dums, and knowies, and worms
and if you have to ask who they were
you just weren’t there.

2.  All past now. But our past is never really gone.
Something in us keepsakes its bests inside the heart.
And to open it, life gives us a night like tonight,

of back-slapping nostalgia, when it all comes
back like a Brigadoon,
just for a night, woken

by a shared mystery that rises uniquely
out of a gathering
of the guys

you got to
share it with –

that time,
those days,
so fair, so rare.
 

Michael Whelan
Brother Aelred/Michael