A 'Class of '63' alum on 60 years of life since leaving Salt Lake City's Highland High School 

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Oh, well, a touch of grey/ Kind of suits you anyway.
—Grateful Dead

The subject of the incoming email was "Ram Book Project." The email was not unexpected. The graying Highland High School Class of 1963 is gearing up to celebrate its diamond anniversary, and the planning generates emails from a group of alumni who have tended the flame of Ram school spirit for 60 years.

What was unexpected was the book project and its ambitious goal of collecting a one-page autobiography from the surviving members of a cohort once 611 strong.

Although the working title of the autobiography—"My Life Since Highland"—evoked an assignment in a Continuing Education class, it did strike a responsive chord: I had been thinking about my alma mater since the announcement that Highland High School might be razed and rebuilt. I even acted on a nostalgic impulse last summer and slipped into the red brick building through an unlocked door.

I walked the empty halls, reviewing the past, trying to discover how my years at Highland shaped my life. Would it have played out differently had I been a West High Panther or a Granite High Farmer instead of a Highland Ram? Ask a similar question of a winemaker, and the answer is yes. Terroir—the French noun for a particular locale's soil and microclimate—makes a difference in the flavor of the grape.

To kickstart the Ram Book Project, the reunion planners suggested eight categories to winnow for material: education, family, career, church, community service, military and travel. The list ended with "What I do now to fill my days" (which struck me as being unintentionally wistful).

Having been a scribbler, I know that writing thoughtful paragraphs would not only fill many days, the effort would yield a surprising number of pages. To distill 60 years' experience into 600 words is like skating backwards: It is harder than it looks.

As Mark Twain observed, "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one."

I have the time needed to write a retrospective as short as an obituary. Self-interest spurs me on. I know I will discover something about myself in the process. Writing is, by its nature, exploratory. What was overlooked in last summer's walkabout in Highland High's dark hallways may come to light in writing the right words for the Ram book.

I also feel a nudge of obligation. Joining this anniversary waltz supports the reunion planners and conveys gratitude for their work.

By writing, I also acknowledge that who I am—perhaps why I am—has been partly determined by the terroir of time and place. The shared experience of our class of 600-plus innocents ended in 1963 just months before President John Kennedy was killed. Diploma in hand, we moved on to college classrooms, Latter-day Saint missions, full-time jobs, the military. Some just disappeared.

I have read that every generation is affected by an overriding event. For the Greatest Generation, it was the Depression. Millennials watched passenger jets bring down the World Trade Center on 9/11. The COVID-19 pandemic upended the lives of Gen Z. The misbegotten war in Vietnam killed 58,220 Baby Boomers.

Vietnam was a defining event for me and my male classmates. We had been involuntarily introduced to soldiering in our sophomore year as cadets in the National Defense Corps. We wore wool uniforms to school. We learned to march, shoot and salute in Highland's basement rooms. We took it all in stride, never admitting to ourselves that there was worse to come.

The wartime draft eventually uprooted me from Utah. I was sent to basic combat training at Fort Dix. There, recruits were schooled in marksmanship, first aid and land navigation. Map-reading classes honed my sense of direction. However, I soon learned that without the Wasatch Mountains visible on the horizon, my orienteering was unreliable. My Army compass seemed fixed on an azimuth that led into waist-deep swamps. Such a touch tends to be self-effacing while giving weight to consequential events.

I hope to find it in the Ram book. Among my 600-plus classmates in 1963, there must have been some goof-offs who caught the digital wave early and rode it to riches. And there were probably some honor graduates who lost money when the dot-com bubble burst in the 1990s.

Irony aside, I have been thinking that Highland's colors could be useful in writing an autobiography. The school colors are black and white, a bifurcation as stark as Republican and Democrat, happy and sad. Between the poles, the blacks and whites merge in shades of gray. There, novelist John Updike found a space "where ambiguity restlessly rules."

I may lack a sense of direction, but I am comfortable with ambiguity and the wiggle room it affords. My days at Highland High were certainly restless. Each of them was subject to churning oscillation. A "D" on a test ruined a good day, as did a scolding from a teacher. A bad day was redeemed by a note from a particular girl or a lunchtime seat among those with high social status.

In Chinese astrology, the rabbit is the symbol of both 2023 and 1963. Thus, the two are considered auspicious years, well suited for "strengthening relationships and pursuing personal growth." A short autobiography could do both.

For a title, I'll pass on "My Life Since Highland." Of more interest to a graybeard like me is an exploration of "My Life Because of Highland." If that founders, there's always the Grateful Dead: "What a long, strange trip it's been."

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