Facebook's for the OLD?

“Facebook’s for gerries,” he scoffed in an email last week. This was my old student Kevin and wasn’t he just always that kind of kid mouthy and walking around with holes in his clothes and refusing to put his hand over his heart during the Pledge of Allegiance even though he was on a stage  being inducted into the National Honor Society at the time.He and I stayed in pretty good touch for a while after he left Somerville High and college and was living in Manhattan. Whenever he was in town he'd come for dinner, bringing our small children some odd sort of a prickly toy they couldn’t really play with but seemed to love anyway. Years later, he gave Carrie the scarred leather jacket from his Bukowski days. I think he got slapped in the head with a tire iron in it once and I’m still pretty sure that was a human bite mark on one sleeve.Anyway I found him on the internet a year or so ago which annoyed him hugely - that he could be found I mean - but soon enough he fell to asking did I ever see this one or that one and while I don’t SEE these long-ago students  I do try to keep track of them from a distance.So I very reasonably suggested he join Facebook which is where three-quarters of the population seems to be these days and that's when he wrote it in a one-sentence email, this mouthy kid with the long crazy hair: "Hah! Facebook's for gerries!" he said. Meaning geriatrics, relics, the old. Meaning ME, even though I’m young enough at heart to not mind being photographed in a rumpled garment like this one here,I can't argue that I am old because listen to this fact which stuns even me: my grandfather’s sister whom I knew and lived with was born during the Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant! My grandmother’s sister who lived with us too was born when Andrew Johnson was President.  Johnson, who took over after Lincoln was shot!That darn Kevin: still pretty much of a bigmouth but he tells it like it is.

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One Tough Old Soldier