There is a sad and dangerous little game we play when we get to be a certain age. It is a form of solitaire. We look back through old photographs of people we knew best and recall the days, all those years ago. We think about all the exciting, crazy, wonderfully characteristic things they used to be interested in and about the kind of dreams we had for them. Then we think about what those people are actually doing with their lives, what we are doing with them now five or ten years later. I make no claim that the game is always sad or that when it seems to be sad our judgment is always right, but once or twice when I have played it myself, sadness has been a large part of what I have felt. Because in my photographs, there were people who had a real flair, a real talent, for something. Maybe it was for writing or singing or sports. Maybe it was an interest and a joy in working with people toward some common goal, a sense of responsibility for people who in some way had less or were less. Sometimes it was just their capacity for being so alive that made me more alive to be with them. Yet now, a good many years later, I have the feeling that more than just a few of them are spending their lives at work in which none of these gifts is being used, at work they seem to be working at with neither much pleasure nor any sense of accomplishment. This is the sadness of the game, and the danger of it is that maybe we find that in some measure we are among them or that we are too blind to see that we are. *adapted