Same story, 53 years later.

The last time I saw these two, we were all 14 years old. They had come to the airfield at Hickham AFB on Oahu to say farewell to me. The three of us went into one of those instant photo booths and made a strip of pictures of us, me with leis piled up to my ear lobes, all of us grinning but teary-eyed, promising to stay in touch and to meet again.

Fast forward 53 years, and we have all lived by the values we had then. We lost touch with each other for many years, but we found each other through the website Cyndi has created to reunite our class from Radford High. If you'd like to see a picture of me at 14, check this page from the website. Scroll down a little further than my listing and you'll see our most famous classmate, Bette Midler.

Cyndi, Jan, and I all realize that our lives have been about finding what we have to offer; finding, as President Kennedy said, what we could do...for our country, for our planet. We rejected materialism and found ways to express our concerns for social justice and art, to live in service to other people and to the planet. Maybe it had something to do with being idealists of the hippie generation. Cyndi suspects it has to do with all of us being from troubled and violent families--which gave us plenty of reason to want to change the world.

Cyndi, on the left in blue, was my best best friend back then and amazed me with her ability in visual arts. She built a career in graphic arts, and now she designs websites, builds e-books, and makes art with computers, CAD, and Photoshop. She has a grounded practical down-to-earth sense of humor that I always loved. That hasn't changed. She still makes me laugh. Jan, on the right in orange, created a life in social service. She still inspires me. We all worked to eradicate racism and to make a more just and equitable planet while making the best we could of the abilities we were born with.

I just spent a wonderful evening reconnecting with the two of them and with our old friend Jane. I met their husbands, who were patient with us as we became 14 again, and we will have more get-togethers over the next four days, along with a few more people from those days in Hawaii. I think we are all a little astonished to realize how much of who we are was fully formed by the time we were fourteen.