Tay Vaughan Ice Hockey

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He was great off the ice, too...

Subject: First Oberlin Alumni Ice Hockey Game - 3/18/06

Hi Everybody!

"Wow! What names are resurfacing after so many years! Me? I'm afraid I'll be on the Left Coast at that time and will be unable to make it (although I'd be game in another year). Anybody seen Tay Vaughan? He was great off the ice, too, rebuilding an old '48 MG in some garage off W. College St., I think. What I remember best was the day he tried to start the sucker by jump starting it on Elm St. Ripped the bumper right off the front, swearing like a madman. Some codger on a porch, observing all this, was laughing his head off, until Tay cursed him out as well!"
...Doc Fast, Class of '66

When my mother died, I found a file folder in her cabinet labeled "Tay," where she had saved clippings and papers from my childhood and youth. She had kept other files, too, for my brothers Chris and Todd. It isn't this news clipping that catches my eye but, always with a stab of loss, it's mom's familiar handwriting -- that simple motion of jotting the date and slipping this paper into her file -- that jumps at me. I know exactly what she was thinking when she did that: In my own cabinet, now, I have long kept a folder labeled "Lizzy."

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Intrepid, 1974

3/23/06

Hello, hello, hello!

I apologize for the late start on this thread -- the flurry of announcements about the Alumni Game caught me deeply buried in the middle of a series of tight deadlines and local activities. Plus, the names of many old good friends (er, many good old friends) and the attached anectdotes of our youth evoked in me a curious desire to set these e-mails aside, to let them steep and settle a bit, before embracing them and you with warranted attention. I've been getting somewhat maudlin as I grow into my 60s, and these electronic hallos lit up some of my fondest memories.

Jeff, I'm alive and well, still swearing a lot, and living in rural Maine. After many years in multiple low- and high-tech careers in the San Francisco Bay Area, in 1998 I bought a 200-year old dairy farm near the seacoast town of Camden, Maine, and moved 3,200 miles to a simpler life. I thought. Within a year after the move, I was caught up in a spectacular discovery and a wrenching divorce. Time mends such abrasions, though, and I'm feeling reasonably unspectacularly normal, now; in a few months I have to declare to the Social Security Administration whether I will take retirement at age 62. Unlikely. I've spent years in denial, burning bulk mail from the AARP in my wood stove. Still have stuff to do.

Been a great ride! But it's been almost too fast to appreciate the people and the relationships and the scenery screaming past... I do remember all of you, like a Buddy Holly song. It was on the ice, clearing the puck to you at the red line with an astonishingly perfect pass, then watching you go in past the defense. It was playing a legato F# against a violin's triplets in a Conservatory practice room. Those times with you were when I learned the flushed pleasure of teamwork.

Yeah, maudlin. I just bought a plot in Pine Grove Cemetery here for $150. Sleeps eight. Needs some work with an excavator, like most places in Maine, but I'll get around to that before it's too late; just being practical. My daughter made Dean's List at college in Boston her first semester just ended. My Swiss friend, Gerti, cooks better than a French five star chef and provides a steady wry European sensibility to counter-balance and temper the rhetoric of CSPAN and Fox News and PBS. Not sure I like the direction things are headed. I've got no more money in the bank than I did when I jump-started that old MG-TD in Oberlin. Life is good.

I'd love to hear more about your own life experiences. We left the Oberlin community on balistic trajectories, almost pre-determined by our circumstance, and ended up, I'd wager, in similar places. Like my hayfield after skeet shooting -- the surviving little red discs are all in a patch. Being a frugal guy who often brings back more than he takes to the dump, I go out and collect the suckers -- on the psychoanalytic upside, I've never been tempted to glue spent pieces back together. But I hope all of you, my friends, are whole and well and collectible.

I played in a local ice hockey league until a year or so ago, when my town foolishly elected me a Selectman, Assessor, and Overseer of the Poor, and those official Tuesday meetings conflicted with ice time. Just started the 7th Edition of my long-legged college textbook about multimedia for McGraw-Hill, now in nine languages. Getting my farm ready to sell -- I'll cut off a few acres down by the river where the beaver dams are, and build my last house on the bluff there, maybe with door ramps and easy access from car to kitchen and a woodshed three steps from the stove. Started a wireless ISP company to deliver broadband to rural families last year (don't ask me about the spreadsheets or financials). Staying busy.

Tom Wolanin - you're the best! I still feel terrible about that night we spent in jail after being dragged out of Presti's Bar and Grille by the Law. What ever happened to Charlie Wheeler - smart, he was, studying Chinese back then? He came to Dagmar's and my wedding in Germany in 1966. Dagmar is Lizzy's godmother and a best friend. And Phil. And Bruce and Chris and Peter and Jeff and Bob and all you guys. Glad you are there for me and my memories!

My fondest memory, the multisense Kodachrome that's indelible and life-long, is the crisp smell and high-pitched skate squeak when you push off from the rubber mat onto Zamboni-fresh ice for warm-ups. That's the most breathable air in the world, close to the ice, searing your lungs with its cool vitality.

Thanks, all, for the chance to revisit that good air with you!

Tay