Thanks to All the Wagnerites Who Found Me When I Was Lost

by Mike MacIver, ’77 | 6 Feb 2026

Epiphany or serendipity are big words that I don’t usually use, so I’m just going to say that I had an ‘aha moment’ I would like to share. It happened as I read Myrna’s “We Don’t Feel Different,” post when she spoke of our upcoming reunion being not so much a look backwards, but rather a celebration of how far we’ve all come and how much we’ve each overcome to bring us Waggies to where we are now.

As I read her words about “… the rare threads [that have] remained unbroken despite time and distance,” and “This reunion isn’t about … remembering who we were … It’s about saying hello again … about finding out how everyone is doing – right now, in this moment, while we still can,” I was reminded, first, of a book I read in 2022 and then, a song someone sent me in the late 70’s.

More about the book and the song in a bit, but the realization – the aha moment – that the book and the song merged to produce was this: whenever I have felt the most lost in life, it has always been a fellow Wagner alum that has helped me get found again. Okay, okay, – maybe not ‘always,’ but in at least 6 out of 7 times, a Waggie has been there for me! (Sorry, please pardon the ‘6-7’ thing – we’ve still got an 8th grader, along with a 2nd grader who acts and talks like his middle school bro, at home!)

And that’s why I am so looking forward to this reunion – to not only “[say] hello again,” but also to convey the sincerest ‘thank you for being there when I needed someone’ to every single fellow Falcon that I can find.

Lost and Found at Wagner

The book that Myrna’s words suggested was Lost & Found by Kathryn Schulz. (Her article in The New Yorker entitled “The Really Big One” won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2016 and is a fascinating read about earthquake potentials – especially if you live in the Pacific Northwest!) In her three-part memoir, Ms. Schulz writes about losing her father, finding her partner, and her “&.” It is what she wrote in the closing paragraph of the third part – the “&” or “And” part as the contents page calls it – that resonated with me in the context of our upcoming reunion: “… loss, which only seems to take away, adds its own kind of necessary contribution. No matter what goes missing, the object you need or the person you love, the lessons are always the same. Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days.”

That got me thinking about losing and finding in all its forms.

Because lost is how I first felt in November of 1973 when my dad’s new assignment took our family from the familiarity of Ft. Hood, Texas, to the foreign location of Luzon in the Philippine Islands. Lost as I tried to navigate a new school that appeared to have been turned inside out. (Why was so much of the school outdoors? Heck, even my locker was outside!) Lost in my Introduction to Physical Science class – the teacher and everyone else in the class could have been speaking Latin for all I knew! That’s how utterly lost I was. Lost, that is, until a fellow Falcon left a very friendly note in my locker. And then, suddenly, I felt found.

From that point forward, until I graduated and said goodbye at the base terminal, the friendships and experiences from Wagner would ‘be there’ whenever I was at my lowest. I didn’t fully appreciate it in real time, but they were foundational. And as I thought back on those years, it dawned on me that what made them so memorable was the unique bond we Wagnerites had formed. A bond born out of love.

And that’s when the song from the 70’s came to mind.

When Love Hurts — Or Does It?

I won’t pretend to speak for everyone, but as for me, as soon as I got back stateside, I was overcome with an overwhelming sense of being utterly… lost. That’s how I felt at the beginning of my first year of college at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio. Everything was just moving at twice the speed that it had been at Clark, and to be honest, I simply missed the vibe of being on a base. But one weekend when I was feeling my most lost, I recall getting a cassette tape in the mail from a Wagner alum. The tape was filled with songs from our Wagner days, and they helped me feel that ‘found’ way once again.

It’s funny, though: of all the songs on the tape, the only one that’s always stuck in my mind over the intervening years is “Love Hurts” by Nazareth. The lyrics begin:

Love hurts, love scars
Love wounds and marks
Any heart
Not tough or strong enough
To take a lot of pain, take a lot of pain
Love is like a cloud
Holds a lot of rain
Love hurts
Ooh, ooh, love hurts

After that first verse, the songwriter admitted, “I’m young, I know, but even so,” and to be honest, until very recently, I feel like I agreed with him. I could see what he meant by “love hurts.”

But in the context of Myrna’s words and Kathryn Schulz’s book, this song suddenly took on a new meaning for me. Instead of “I’m young, I know, but even so,” I think I would now argue that ‘I’m old, I know, and now I see’ that it is not really love that hurts, but rather life that hurts because we love. And it is that love we get from others that gets us through life’s hurts. It gets us through the downs to the ups. It gets us found when we are lost.

A Lifetime of Waggies Finding Me

When I felt lost during my first Christmas away from home, it was a fellow Waggie who found and invited me to spend the holidays with her and her dad. The same lost-and-found scenario also occurred during Spring Break, when another Wagner classmate, whose parents lived in San Antonio, dropped by St. Mary’s for a surprise visit.

Returning to Clark for the summer between my freshman and sophomore year – yeah, not really an example of being too lost. Maybe just a big found or, in the words of Yogi Berra, “[It was] déjà vu all over again!”

When I transferred to the University of Texas at Austin for my sophomore year, it was a fellow Waggie who gave me a place to stay until I found an apartment off campus.

When I felt lost during my second Christmas away from home, it was a whole family of fellow Waggies that found me and invited me to spend the holidays with them in one of the most beautiful places on earth – Bandon, Oregon!

When a UT friend and I set out on a Spring Break road trip (with a case of Lone Star in the backseat!) to Colorado and got a tad “lost,” it was a Waggie who called the Highway Patrol to find us.

After being told “not quite yet” following my first proposal to a girl in Dallas, it was a newly married, high-school-sweethearts-at-Wagner couple who let lost and forlorn me stay with them in their basement apartment while I licked my wounds. (And I was singing – and believing – “Love Hurts” repeatedly, at that point!)

At my first Wagner Reunion – in San Francisco – it was a Wagner alum who arranged not one but two babysitters to watch my firstborn son in our room at the St. Francis Hotel so my wife and I could attend the formal.

After my mom died and I was trying to decide how to care for my ‘lost without her’ dad, it was a Wagner alum who spent hours counseling me on the phone, sharing how she found care for her dad when he had been in a similar situation.

I have felt very fortunate after both my retirement from the Air Force and my retirement from teaching to have found two dear Wagner friends that I had lost touch with. I can’t tell you how much it meant to reconnect with those two guys.

One last ‘lost’ – my son, Brice. I am very aware of the painful fact that there are many among those who will read this who have also lost a child, a spouse, a parent, or a sibling, or simply someone who they loved very, very dearly. Someone who meant the world to them. Someone who made their lives full. Someone who, without them in our lives, we felt – and in some cases still painfully feel – lost.

Hopefully, our meanderings through the grief of losing someone eventually lead us all to finding a new path. For me, when I lost Brice, it was the Wagner group collectively (via Facebook) that helped me hang on. I may not have had the fortitude at the time to respond to all the kind words of encouragement and love, but I read every single syllable that you posted, and it made the difference. I am eternally grateful for every one of you.

Countless Wonderful Finds

Shortly after Brim was published, I was fortunate to have an electronic conversation with Kathryn Schultz during which I told her Lost & Found, after I finished devouring it, was the most dog-eared, underlined, and highlighted book I had ever read. Consequently, she sent me a pristine copy with an inscription that read, in part, “… wishing you a future full of countless wonderful finds ~ above all, of meaning and peace.” I do, in fact, continue to find meaning and peace in every today and tomorrow that life grants me, but in thinking about the upcoming reunion I have also realized that thanks to all the Wagnerites my life has been graced with, my yesterdays have also been filled with countless (and priceless!) “wonderful finds.”

One of those wonderful finds was literally that. Recently, I accidentally stumbled into my Messenger app where I found a two-year-old post from someone I see on the attendee list for our reunion. She helped me find a large dose of “meaning and peace” when she shared that she had used Brim as a “springboard” to have a hard conversation with a son. Being a male in the military and in the classroom, I have fallen out of the habit of hugging. I hope she doesn’t mind, but I’m going to come looking for her in San Antonio and give her the best hug I can muster.

So … time to get off stage.

In his song “Remember When,” Alan Jackson wrote:

We said when we turned gray
When the children grow up and move away
We won’t be sad, we’ll be glad
For all the life we’ve had
And we’ll remember when

So, let’s all come together in San Antonio and “be glad for all the life we’ve had.” Let’s come with a sense of gratitude for all we found at Wagner and the love of fellow Falcons that followed us through our losses and helped us all to find “meaning and peace.” I can’t imagine having a firmer foundation for life than the one Wagner gave me. And I can’t wait for October to say ‘thank you’ to every Waggie in attendance!

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