50-Year-Reunion

Ran Henry

When you have buried your parents and your best friends you know that high school is over. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay tells us and Bluefield High School English Teacher Joy Sarver eternally reminds us. We are far up the Stairway to Heaven, David Ledgerwood and David Humphries play and sing for us, as long as we have memories. Still playing our game, John Baker would marvel. Far out, Robby Brannon would say, revering sweet home West Virginia. Leaving home for college, leaving home after college to work at the Florida Times - Union in Jacksonville, following that dream, I lived by the ocean with Guy Kiely until he threatened neighbors who didn ’ t like Lynyrd Skynyrd played loud with a shotgun. Interviewing the surviving band members for their hometown paper after their plane fell short of the runway in a Mississippi swamp I moved South to Treasure Island and met a gold - belted goddess at a costume party, thinking I was Mick Jagger. We have two vivacious, accomplished daughters to thank for seeing the light of the Catholic Church across the water on my 30 th birthday and converting from Jaggerism to Catholicism. Walking from the pier in Jacksonville Beach where the pier rats surf to Miami on the beach for a story for Tropic: The Sunday Magazine of the Miami Herald brought us to South Florida, trying to reckon with the death of Beaver's wiliest quarterback in Murrell ’ s Inlet, doing 110 on his Harley a quarter mile from home. Adulthood is the kingdom where childhood friends die. When Robby died fighting a fire, sacrificing himself for the people and town he loved, and Tropic Magazine died and the Pulitzer Prize winning authors and editors I worked with went to the Washington Post and daughter Sarah went to be with the Gators at the University of Florida the time came to move north to Charlottesville where my namesake great - grandfather enrolled at the University of Virginia at age 16 so he could join the Confederate Army and fight Yankees in Gettysburg for a Terrible Cause. Atonement for forefathers' sins has me teaching at UVA, a writing professor in the Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies Program since 2007, taking three years off to teach at the nation ’ s top honors college at the University of South Carolina.

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