Daily Archives: July 31, 2012

I have been looking for a photo from my high school graduation for years, and I’ve never been able to find it. Today I was cleaning my room and decided that it has been some time since I dusted (vacuumed) the two bookshelves that make up one entire interior wall. The bookshelves are floor-to-ceiling built-ins of ten shelves each. My father and I built them for me shortly after I graduated. Now I’ve cleaned them a lot since they were built … a least once every decade.

Well, on the top shelf I found  a copy of James Kirkwood’s P.S. Your Cat Is Dead which was published in 1972. I think I bought the novel  when I was in NYC in the spring of  ’75. I had just seen one of the twenty-one  performances of the play Kirkwood had adapted from his novel. I thought it was hilarious. But I don’t think the critics were very impressed about a play where one of the three main characters spends much of the play tied down on the kitchen table with his bare butt exposed. Also I don’t think hunky gay bare-assed burglars were very big audience attraction. Kier Dullea starred, but not as the bare-assed burglar. Anyway, the book was even funnier. BTW, Kirkwood got even with his detractors by writing the script for some musical that opened three months after P.S. closed. I think it was called A Chorus Line.

So getting back to my story, I was dusting and found this dusty old book and when I opened it I discovered the photo for which I had been searching. It was the last photo taken with me, my father and my grandmother. My grandmother died the next year, and my father died five years later.

This photo was taken in June of 1957. My mother is also in the picture, but I was in a lot of photos with her in the fifty years that followed. Also if you look closely, you can see my little brother’s head peeking over the porch rail.

And if you’re curious and do the math, you’ll discover that this year was the 55th anniversary of my high school graduation from William Cullen McBride H.S.  It was the same high school my father had attended back in 1928 … for just one year.

No real celebration this year, other  than the regular every other month lunch with about 30 classmates. We might be getting old, but we try to stay young.