We are back in Rochester for some extended time now. Reunions are behind us and Jazz Fest is just around the corner (did I really say that?) 

Brown Reunion, my 55th, was a great weekend. The class had two dinners and a lovely luncheon. Given our advancing age the parties seemed to peter out by 9:30. I don’t think anyone went to the Campus Dance on Friday night. It is 9 PM to 1 AM and it is outdoors on the College Green – chilly. There were many forums on Saturday. We went to a presentation on 50 Years of Dance at Brown. That started 5 years after I graduated. It was wonderful hearing how a dance program started in the English Department! I took time out to get fitted in my cutaway for my role as a Class Marshal for the Commencement the next day. Later Carol and I went to the Jabberwoks 70th Reunion presentation. this has been the longest standing acapella  group. They had performances by members from each decade since the 50’s. 

Commencement is a walk through the Van Wickle gate which opens in at the beginning of the academic year and opens out for the graduates to leave at the close of the year. After the Corporate and Academic procession, before the graduating class, the Alumni march through the gate, the eldest first. This year the eldest was back for her 80th reunion. she was alone at 102 years old.

Here I am ready to join the other three Class Marshals for 1964 in the Commencement Parade. Each class peels off to the curb eldest to youngest down College Hill. The last class through was the 2019 graduates.  Once they were past us we inverted the parade and passed through all the younger classes to great roaring and high fives as we passed each group.  It is always exciting to participate. It is also tiring as we were standing in the heat for over 2 hours and the cutaway outfit certainly was not designed in a hot weather area. 

We had a lovely dinner with the Londons that evening and prepared to drive to Boston for the day on Monday. We visited the MFA for a few hours – barely time to scratch the surface – and then went on the nephew Ross, Kristin and kids for another kind of reunion before returning to Providence for one more night in the lovely VRBO apartment we had rented. We rose in the morning and began the drive to Rochester with a planned stop to visit my Uncle Josh in Syracuse just a couple of days before his 94th birthday. We had a lovely lunch he made from food he ordered from Wegmans and then proceeded back to Rochester, finally abandoning the Interstate and taking US 20 from Skaneatles to Canandaigua before resuming the Thuway and Interstates for the last few miles. 

We got back in time for Carol to attend the 50th anniversary of Visual Studies Workshop where she got her MFA in 1991. It was another walk into the past and the photographers there and represented there were among the greatest names in photography. The late Nathan Lyons, founder of the Workshop, was feted and honored and the weekend concluded, for us, with a visit to the George Eastman Museum which has a massive retrospective of Nathan’s work including his last works where he started working in digital color!

Since then we have been catching up with reorganizing the apartment and letting Carol have rest time to aid her healing.