There were two quite different but significant events I attended last week but there was a link. The first event was a graduation concert for my grandchild. He was finishing kindergarten. When I started school at St. Bon’s many years ago there was no kindergarten. It had not been invented yet although there were a couple of private schools like Miss Hann’s School for Little Gentlemen on Deanery Avenue. I did not go there. My schooling started with Grade 1 and went until Grade 11. Dad used to tell me earnestly that if you could get your Grade 11 you could “write your own ticket”. I laugh now at the phrase, but I see from what I learned down through the years that Dad was on the right track. Grade 1 is gone now as the first year of school and Grade 11 is gone as the last year of school but Dad’s thoughts on education were in the right direction.

The concert and my grandson last week brought me something strange. The whole thing filled me with deep emotion. I tried to hide it as I sat in the back row of the auditorium with my wife and family and craned my neck and saw my young grandson up there on the stage. He was in the front row and was so little and so earnest. He sang with his classmates and performed in all the right ways. It all went perfectly except one of his little classmates started to cry and had to be given an off-stage break. It did not matter, it was all wonderful and, in a way, moving.

The concert was a time of great reflection for me. I waved heartily to my grandson in the middle of it all. He told me after that he knew I was there. That pleased me. I hope I did not embarrass him. Seeing him in his school concert shirt made be think about what I sometimes call “time passages”. One of the great truths of life is that it sure does not take long. I was at my own first school concert back in 1954. I was about seven years old. As I mentioned, we started school later in those days.

This thought occurred to me somewhere between songs in last week’s concert, where did the years go? Can it really have been 70-odd years between hearing two different versions of Row, Row, Row Your Boat?  One was in a Conception Bay school auditorium and the other in the Aula Maxima at St. Bon’s. How did that happen?

Somewhere in the gap between the years me are successes and failures, wins and losses, triumphs and tragedies. I wondered to myself what lay ahead for my little grandson. I hope he does well. I am sure he will. It is a great question without answer.

The other event I attended last week was on the same day as the kindergarten concert. It was a funeral in St. John’s. I was out to a funeral home to pay respects to an old friend who had died after what I call “a life well lived”. She was into her 90s and remained active every year of her life. She was part of a wonderful and large family, and they were all there to see her off.

Her husband, also gone to glory, and her sons were like myself – St. Bon’s boys and all, like me, grew up on Pleasant Street. They were up above the Patrick Street intersection. I was below it. There was also a card playing connection between our two families.

The wake was a great send-off if you can say about a funeral but there was still great sadness about it. I looked across the room at the casket and the mourners and my friend’s family and wondered a similar thought to the one I had at my grandson’s kindergarten concert. Where have the years gone?

In the two events I attended, the concert and the funeral, there is connection and meaning. I am not even sure how to express it, but it is there. There is some eternal truth that is, on some important level, part of life. That part I do understand even if I can’t  put it in words. 

You can contact Jim Furlong at jfurlong@ntv.ca