My husband, Fred, is gearing up for a big fraternity reunion in Florida this fall. I’m supposed to help him draft a recap of the past 40 years for the function-planning Web site and then to oblige as designated driver during the brotherhood’s four-day bacchanalia.
Seeking inspiration for Fred’s bio. I perused the personal sketches that prospective attendees have submitted, via e-mail. Potential party-goers also were asked to send photos — “Full body shots, no hats” — so their fellow fraternity tribesmen can recognize each other after decades of being incommunicado.
Among my favorites was the blurb provided by the fraternity’s only jock, according to Fred. The former place-kicker for the football team wrote that he now lives in Colorado where he owns a fried-chicken franchise. But, he added, his wife makes three times his salary by serving as an International Alpaca Judge, a title that apparently requires capitalization.
A second correspondent said that he’d spent his entire two-year army stint in Alaska, surely a coveted posting at the height of the Vietnam conflict. After the war, he’d stayed in the state to build houses and offices for the oil-and-pipeline boom, reportedly living without electricity for 17 years, he noted.
He’d persuaded several frat kin to follow suit, later marrying the ex-wife of one when the later Florida-to-Alaska migrant “received a spiritual calling to India,” he wrote.
Some of the bios were succinct, such as the one submitted by the fraternity’s former leader, aka the “Grand Master,” a title that also evidently mandates capitalization. He wrote, “One wife, 37 years, one law firm, 35 years, five golf trips to Scotland.”
One communiqué came from a guy who aims to host a reunion reception and perhaps thought it prudent to alert the aging college cadre of the new symptoms of stroke, which mainly seem to involve tongue control. Not tongue control in the sense of diplomatic speak, but from the standpoint of literal muscle function, as in “Does it protrude? Wag from left to right?”
That medical missive prompted another brother to send health tips of a more general nature. He wrote, for example, that one may calculate body/fat ratio thusly: “If you have one body and you have body fat, your body/fat ratio is one to one.”
Further reasoning that swine primarily consume a plant-based diet, he advised that, “A pork chop can give you 100 percent of your recommended daily allowance of vegetable slop.”
I’m clueless about the form Fred’s bio should take. Forty years ago, he played several intramural sports for the fraternity and designed its homecoming floats. But since then, his athletic endeavors have been limited to fishing and his creative undertakings confined to generating an annual Christmas card.
Back in college, Fred changed majors about as often as his underwear and invested almost seven years in earning his undergraduate degree. Yet in the ensuing years, he’s worked for only one employer and, so far at least, has had just one wife. He’s never traveled outside North America, as far as I know, and the most daring thing he does is to drink half-and-half past the carton’s expiration date.
Rather than relay such a bland profile, he could always submit the results of his most recent physical — cholesterol counts, blood-pressure readings, etc. — and pretend that he thought the requested “bio” stood for biology instead of biography.
Such a clinical history might come in handy at the event if, say, his tongue starts to loll.
E-mail Jan Galletta at jangalletta@comcast.net.
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