Learning Through Friendship: One Man’s Story (Part 5)
June 2017 Reunion
We had planned to have a reunion in October 2015 in Palo Alto but Yus took a bad fall and I had a pinched nerve and could not walk. We canceled. In mid-2016, Yus, Dave, Sam, and I began talking about setting another reunion date. I traveled to Pittsburgh in December and spent five days with Yus and Nancy, had dinner with Sam and Hannah, and attended a Sunday morning book club discussion of a new graphic novel. Yus and I talked a lot about a possible reunion in Palo Alto in the spring.
Those discussions continued after I returned home but became more than talk when Yus’s son Bruce volunteered to go with Yus and Sam on the trip to help his Dad negotiate the walking in airports and around my home. Had Bruce not decided to join his Dad, the reunion would not have occurred.
And that brings me to another AK reunion of octogenarians taking place in Palo Alto in June 2017.
And what a four days and nights it was! The time we were together consisted of long conversations around meals at home and in restaurants (my daughter Janice joined us one evening), taking walks in the neighborhood and at a nearby park, sitting on the patio sunning ourselves as we conversed and in the living room in one-on-one discussions about family, friends, politics, and life in general as AKers. Bruce, the youngest of all of us, walked with us and joined in these discussions. Once a day, Yus, Sam , and I would use my phone to do FaceTime with Dave in LA to see one another and talk.
Talk about losses from both age and disease in what we can physically do—one of us is on a walker, another has a pacemaker, another uses a cane—and dealing with the emotions accompanying such losses wove in and out of our CONTINUE READING: Learning Through Friendship: One Man’s Story (Part 5) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
