May 4, 2026

The class started at 5:30 AM. Jennifer, the instructor, called directions. We teetered into a variation of the “plank” position, one arm stretched skyward. She walked over and adjusted my stance, pushing my arm forward. I struggled for breath. She moved on to check on someone else. I relaxed and dropped my tired arms.

We went on for an hour at the YMCA sunrise yoga class. Soft music played, candles glowed in the dimly lit room. Jennifer whispered commands, warrior pose, child pose, downward dog. The veterans moved smoothly through the routine. A few others, like me, cheated here and there. Soon we all lay prone, arms stretched behind us, eyes closed.  When the class ended Jen murmured an incantation.

The students rolled up their mats, chatted a bit, then drifted away. It was still dark outside. A couple of friends talked about their plans for the day. One young woman shouldered her mat and gym bag and said, “I’ve been reading Ecclesiastes. You know, basically, take the good with the bad, do your best every day.”

She was paraphrasing, but I got her meaning. The first few lines include, “What profit has man from all the labor which he toils at under the sun? One generation passes and another comes, but the world forever stays.”

She smiled. “Well anyway, it helps,” she said. “I have to get the kids going.” She walked through the front door.

Ecclesiastes strikes a chord with the Sixties-vintage set, who played and replayed the Byrds’ 1965 ballad, Turn, Turn, Turn, which is eight verses of the third chapter: “To everything there is a season … and a time to every purpose under heaven, a time to be born, a time to die,” and so on.

It rang resoundingly through the decade of revolution, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the courage of the freedom marchers, the terrorist bomb attacks of the Weather Underground.

The yoga routine is a jump-start for coping for young parents: children, work, bills, relationships. The relaxed muscles help. The grayheads in the class, exactly two of us, also are borrowing lines from Ecclesiastes, we’re the generation passing. We are keeping doctors’ appointments, going for tests, finalizing wills. It’s a holding action, postponing the inevitable.

Sandy and I made plans, mostly negative plans. We dropped the annual 900-mile round trip to Virginia for the mid-May Massanutten Mountain race. Gas is over $4.00/gallon and could be more if the war is still going on. A few other old-timers still show up in Fort Valley to mark the trails, handle parking, work at aid stations. But only a few. Our generation is passing.

The St. Anselm College reunion in New Hampshire also is out. Ecclesiastes is haunting it. Reunions, after all, are acts of defying time. The class of ’71 lately has been less good at defying it. Like every other class.

We know of shining exceptions. Nearly a month ago, on April 11, the Navy commissioned its newest destroyer, USS Harvey C. Barnum Jr. (DDG-124) in Norfolk, Virginia. The ship’s name honors Col. Barnum USMC (Ret.), a St. Anselm alum, class of ’62, who as a one-year first lieutenant won the Medal of Honor in Vietnam in 1965 after a horrific firefight at an obscure place called Ky Phu.  

Barnum spoke at the ceremony: “Our strength is not built on technology alone,” he said, referring to the ship’s loadout of radars, guns, and missiles, “but on trust, trust that we will stand by one another and that no one will ever be left behind.” He then issued his own command to the ship’s crew: “Charge On!” The colonel, 86 in July, doesn’t show any sign of slowing down.

Then there’s the rest of us. We’re scheduled to show up in June, for the third straight year, at Sandy’s family’s get-together in Mount Juliet, Tenn., a half-hour east of Nashville. The Harper family, originally from Franklin County, is nestled mostly in the middle of the state, with a few people sprinkled around Georgia and (I think) Florida. It will be a far different affair than the Barnum commissioning.

Two years ago the event attracted a good-sized crowd of uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews, nieces. Last year it was smaller. A thunderstorm swept in, so did mortality. We looked around and missed people. Sandy’s sister Kay and brother-in-law Dale had passed, both a decade younger than “Barney” Barnum. Last summer her second brother-in-law, Alex, died. Other familiar faces won’t be there.

We’ll drive into Nashville and visit the Veterans Cemetery where her parents and brother lie. Later we’ll stop by our old house near Vanderbilt University. In June it will be 40 years since we said goodbye to the place. Last summer, year 39, we talked to a neighbor, a young woman who hadn’t been born until decades after we drove away with our three kids, two of them then under five. The fourth, Kathleen, showed up in Jersey.

We’ll stroll up the street and stop at the Kroger supermarket, which used to be a Harris Teeter, which used to be a Compton’s Food Town, in the dark ages of the early 1980s. Across the street is Brown’s Diner, now a lunchtime hot spot instead of the cramped tavern of long ago.

But the past also is exhausting. Memories can be good lessons or hard ones. Forty years raises ghosts, sometimes regrets. Some things could have turned out another way. Still, the words remain, the eternal wisdom: one generation is passing, another comes. We’ll hang around for a while, then turned to the six-hour trip home. Traffic will be heavy on I-40 East. The plan, as always: move forward, or: “Charge On!”