Carl Conrad
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Carl Conrad |
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| Kalamazoo, MI | |
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| [email protected] | ||
| As I
entered the year 2000, both my mother and father died, unexpectedly, within two months of
each other. My mother died in February 2000, after a battle of nearly three months with
cancer in a hospital in Florida, and my father died instantly of a heart attack in April
2000 while bending over to pick up a tennis ball at the Jackson Racquet Club where he was
playing tennis with three friends. Those events really staggered me for awhile, as I’m sure they have many others in the Parkside High School class of 1966. We have experienced it all by now — death, marriage, divorce — war, scandal, sickness — children, travel, moving — job changes, technology revolutions, political upheaval and turmoil — and PRICES! How can we forget when McDonald’s hamburgers were 15¢, and when gas was 20¢ per gallon and they PUMPED it for you? Those things have all happened within the first 50 years of our lifetimes! I currently teach Economics at Davenport University in Kalamazoo, where I have been teaching and living since 1991. Prior to that, I worked in banking for 7 years in commercial loans and branch management at 2 different banks, living in Jackson, South Haven, and Holland at different times and prior to that, I worked for six years in Human Resources and Purchasing at what was then called Aeroquip Corporation in Jackson. That pretty much capsulizes the major events in my life since high school. But as I look back on my high school years, I have come to realize that it has always been the people I remember more than the events. Jim Pickford, Bart Troyer, Tom Kimling, Missy Hunt, Patti Dudt, Jim I have been married three times (twice to the same woman, believe it or not), and I have been divorced three times (twice from the same woman, of course). I have a daughter, Whitney, from my first marriage. She is 24 and graduated from Saint Mary’s College (South Bend, IN) two years ago. She then moved to Boston where her boyfriend is enrolled in graduate school at Harvard in Applied Physics. She has not yet been married, and is working as an administrative assistant in a stock-reporting business right in downtown Boston. It’s a pretty exciting time for her at this point in her life. To be a 24-year-old, single, working woman in Boston, with a boyfriend enrolled at Harvard University might be hard for her to top at any other time in her life. But who knows? I also have a son, Evan, from my second marriage, who is nearly 13 and is about to enter that awkward and endlessly befuddling experience called Middle School. He is a good student, but doesn’t like going to school. He attends every day, but finds it boring and too long. Didn’t we ALL think of it that way? He’s interested in video photography, and is very clever and inventive when it comes to using the computer. Nowadays he’s busy burning CDs, surfing Napster, downloading MP3s, e-mailing his friends, and adjusting images from my digital camera. Things have sure changed from the days when we used to listen to phonograph records, play 8-track tapes, take pictures with a Polaroid camera, and watch American Bandstand! Burkart, Don McKone, Keith Stone, and Mike Patterson were some very close friends who helped me get through it all — high school romances, pressures to get into college, athletics, cars, drinking, sex ... and parties! It’s primarily to see as many of those people as I can, and to relive a few of those glorious moments that I have come to all of the reunions so far — 1976, 1986, 1991, 1996, and now, 2001. I have enjoyed seeing how much people have changed, and how much they’ve actually stayed the same. Who still has hair left? Who hasn’t put on at least another 20 or 30 pounds? And I have laughed until I ached at some of the memories people have shared. Isn’t it a relief to know that we didn’t have to turn out the way everyone said we would? The most notable thing I’ve done recently was to go to China for a week with my lifelong friend, Tom Kimling. He had been there quite a few times before — both to work and to visit — and I asked if I could go with him the next time he went. He said sure, so in January of 2001 we spent two days in Hong Kong, and four days in Guangzhou, China. For me, the trip was the most totally disorienting thing I have ever done in my life. The time changes, the 14-hour flight, the language differences, money conversions, food, transportation, utensils, even some of the bathrooms! Everything was so different and confusing. When I got back, I described it as somewhat like the movie Apocalypse Now, where the main character goes on a long, slow, mysterious journey to somewhere far away, completely different from anything he’s ever known; people have to help him all along the way, but he never sees them again after he moves on; and he wonders what he’ll find up ahead, but he knows that it will always be something totally unexpected. Then, when he gets back, he wonders if he ever really went! I have called it the single most TOTALLY UNTOPPABLE experience of my life because it required me to cope with so many things that were unfamiliar to me, and required a kind of blind willingness to keep going at times despite my confusion and natural reluctance. I can’t imagine that I will ever be able to top that for the challenges, fears, and apprehensions that it made me face. But I’ll have to see what the future actually has in store for me. I’ve heard Tom talking about Thailand lately! Maybe I haven’t reached my limits yet! |