The School Days of Our Lives...

Time is measured precisely in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years. Almost without exception, we all carry a device that measures time. I wear a wristwatch 24 hours a day. I have one of those neat indiglo watches and, day or night, I can discern the precise time. There is never a moment in my life when I'm without it. I remove it only when taking a shower.

When I was a child, time seemed to pass ever so slowly. Birthdays seemed to take forever to arrive. The same could be said about Christmas. However as I grew older, time seem to pass more rapidly. Birthdays come and go much more rapidly. It's the same with Christmas. The older I get, days seem to pass more rapidly. Yet time passes at the same rate of speed today as it did in in 1947 when I entered first grade.

Have you ever thought about how many days we spent going to school from from first grade until we graduated? Using my trusty calculator, I computed the number of days we attended elementary, jr. high, and and high school. Believe it or not, we attended school approximately 2,160 days from first grade through graduation from high school. It seemed to be a huge number of days in May of 1959.

Which leads me to consider how many days have passed since we graduated. How many days will have passed from the day we graduated until we celebrate the 50th anniversary of our graduation? Again, using my trusty calculator and considering the leap years, I figure the amount of time that will pass between gradation day and 50th anniversary graduation celebration day is something close to 18,263 days. Wow! On one hand --the one with the wristwatch-- that seems like an awful lot days. On the other hand, --the one without the wristwatch-- it seems as though it was only a few days since we graduated. The days of our lives have passed rapidly. Where have they gone? How have we lived them?

As I close this blog post, there are 22 days remaining before we gather in Elk City to celebrate 50 years since graduation day in 1959. Putting it another way, 18,241 days ago, we graduated from high school. In 22 days we will gather and tell stories to one another about the 18,263 days of our lives since May 23, 1959. What a day that will be! Here's looking forward to seeing my classmates of the Hammon Class of '59. See ya'll in Elk City!