From Oklahoma! to Oh! Calcutta!

I know you're in there
You're just out of sight
Oh, time passages
--Time Passages, Al Stewart

Your echo comes back out of tune
Now you can quite get used to it
Reverb is just a room
--Hope, Jack Johnson

Vanity of vanities; all is vanity
--Ecclesiastes
_________________

Ranger is waxing philosophic.

He read in Saturday's Boston Globe that Barbara D. Metras, 99, had died. Ms. Metras was the first woman in the Armed Services to retire after 20 years of service. She attained the rank of Chief Petty Officer in 1945. He also learned that the rock formation "The Old Man of the Mountain" had fallen off Cannon Mountain in the White Mountains years before his recent arrival there (in 2003, actually).

He will be attending his 40th college reunion next month, and will be part of a group which will address ROTC cadets from the class of 2008/09. This set him to thinking how it would have been for him had the commensurate occasion occurred upon his graduation in 1968. Those men would have been class of 1928! Practically geezers. How might their experiences have comported with those of the psychedelic love children?

Then he thought about how hip people in his generation still imagine themselves to be: "We introduced yoga, transcendental meditation, Esalen." They listened to The Beatles, and Rolling Stones and The Doors and "Hair" and "Oh! Calcutta" . . . But what if -- just what if -- the things they ushered in were not societal positives. What if the Class of 1928 held better values and mores?

After all, before them was Moon River and Frank Sinatra and "Oklahoma!" and "The Music Man". After them was Johnny Rotten, Biggie Smalls "All That Jazz" and "Rent" (in no particular order.)

Ranger has outlived a geologic formation. He muses he will appear positively neolithic to these young cadets. Perhaps he will become, after many eons of compaction, fuel for some future H2.

A sobering thought.