Yesterday, our Arkadelphia High School class of 1966 gathered for the 60th anniversary fellowship. (Sixtieth! That can’t be! No, wait. I turn 78 today. I guess it has been that long.) I very much wish I could be there, but I’m on the road to Orlando for this year’s Southern Baptist Convention.

Looking at myself in the mirror, I do, indeed, see the difference between my high school appearance and today’s. The old photo shows me on the right on the back row of a Key Club shot. The high schooler to the left of the shot is Bob Fisher. He’s in a coat and tie, signaling his upcoming life of respectability and achievement. Ross Benson (in the middle) and I seem to have our feet planted firmly in casualness.

Well, sure enough, Bob has been a remarkably effectual leader, honored in Nashville for the way he’s blessed Belmont University with extraordinary growth, including major construction projects. BTW, my dad taught there in the early 1950s before he moved to Arkadelphia to teach at OBU (then OBC) in 1954. Belmont used to be an up-scale, women’s college, Ward-Belmont, before the Baptists acquired it only a few years before we arrived. That’s why we lived in an old sorority house (without the sorority) and why empty riding stables were just up the street

I’ve been blessed with vettix.org, a source of free tickets for those who’ve served as first responders or military personnel. Last Saturday, using VetTix, I took some friends from church (plus Don Sloan, AHS ’66) to a NASCAR race. Not long before that, Sharon and I went to “An Evening with Albert Brooks,” a comedian/actor who got his start years ago. (He made his first appearance on Johnny Carson in 1971.) Brooks and Kevin Pollak (one of the defense lawyers with Tom Cruise and Demi Moore in A Few Good Men) sat in big chairs on stage and had a great, reminiscing conversation for over an hour. And the setting was elegant—The Fisher (as in Bob and Judy) Center for the Performing Arts at Belmont.

As we approached the entrance, we came upon statues of our classmates, and, inside, we were dazzled by the layout. Mercy! Way to go, you two.