ALAN writes:

This week brought the unwelcome news that one of my parochial school classmates is no longer with us.

Like most of our classmates, George and I were altar boys. In memory, I can still picture him at early morning Mass in his white surplice and black cassock.

In our school years, George always seemed to me to be one of the top students in our class. He was good at school subjects and also at sports and games. He was one of the fastest runners in our class. That was important to boys at age 8-10.

George and I were never close friends, but that was only because no one in a class of 30 or more children could become close friends with everyone else. But I remember George as always being there and always in good humor. He was an all-around good fellow.

When I think of George in those years, I think of balance and proportion. He seemed to have an intuitive understanding of such things. It seemed he was always in control of himself, never giving too little or too much in the way of energy or attention. It seemed that George always had his head on straight.

His family lived just a few houses down from our school. Shortly after noon on the day John Kennedy was murdered, our teacher asked George if he would go to his house and bring back a radio by which she and our class could keep informed of events in Dallas. George agreed to do so.

George and I fell out of contact for half a century. We met again at our 50-year class reunion in 2014.

At last year’s reunion, I gave him copies of three color photographs my mother took at a birthday party in 1958. In one of them, George is grinning at the camera with a mouthful of ice cream. He enjoyed seeing the pictures, but neither he nor I had any concrete memories from that day. We could not even remember the names of some other classmates in the pictures.

Baseball cards were another matter. George remembered vividly how all of us played games with Topps baseball cards in 1959. During recess at school, we flipped the cards or sailed them toward a window ledge at ground level, hoping that they would land securely on the ledge and stay there. If your card fell off, you lost and the other boy won—and sometimes walked away with a bulging pocketful of treasured baseball cards.

At class reunions, people talk in multiple, simultaneous conversations. At one such moment, I overheard parts of a conversation about baseball and handheld gadgets with screens. Apparently George had attended a recent Cardinals’ game and was talking about something he saw there—not the game, but something else. What he said was:

What gets me is how the younger people sitting there in the ballpark are not watching the action on the field right there in front of them but are, instead, looking down at their little screens.

He said this not in a tone of anger but in exasperation or bafflement at the sight of something so absurd: Young people mesmerized by gadgets at the very moment when real life in living color, stereophonic sound, and three dimensions stands right there in front of them in the form of athletes engaged in a contest of skill and sportsmanship in the all-American game of baseball.

I know exactly how George felt about that because I feel exactly the same way.

When George and I were boys, nothing was more wonderful than a Saturday afternoon or weekday evening filled with sunshine, green grass, blue sky, and enough boys at the neighborhood park to form two teams for a baseball game we would improvise at that moment. We knew many such days in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Those were “yellow days”, golden days, happy days. We knew life at its best—directly, not filtered and cheapened by little screens. We were in love with life. We wanted to act and play and run and jump and wrestle and explore and find things out and hit and catch baseballs…..not sit and watch other people do those things on screens.

I believe George would agree with me when I say that he and I and our classmates were fortunate indeed to grow up at a time before television screens appeared everywhere and parents permitted their children to become infatuated with such gadgets.

A good man is now gone, and that is why I am sad.

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