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On a sunny Friday afternoon in May, 1965, to the lush strains of Sibelius and Rachmaninoff, about 300 graduates of Winnipeg's Kelvin High School assembled in the school auditorium for what was formally known as closing exercises. Well dressed (on this occasion), we were distinguished principally by our colour, which was uniformly, almost absurdly, white. In fact, our demographic mix — no blacks, no Hispanics, no Asians — would be virtually unimaginable in contemporary urban Canada. Among us, there was precisely one Italian, one Greek, one Lithuanian, a few Mennonites and Ukrainians and 22 Jews. The rest, the vast majority, were Protestant descendants of the Scot, Irish and British immigrants who had largely settled south Winnipeg — the Feasbys and the McCulloughs, the Briggs and the Joneses, the Hurleys and the Robinsons.

This was our known universe and we did not think twice about it. I suspect it would not have been appreciably different in Edmonton, Toronto or Halifax, before the late sixties waves of immigration began to enrich Canadian culture.

That same year, Kelvin had celebrated the opening of a new wing, needed to accommodate projected enrolments. The addition replaced part of the original structure, a beloved, storied, 50-year-old, ramshackle, four-storey behemoth whose wooden floors, warping and woofing like oceanic waves, made transit through the corridors a comic adventure. The remainder of the building would come down over the summer. Sometimes literally, and certainly metaphorically, our Grade 12 class might have been said to have one foot in the old world and one in the new.

In his valedictory address that day, my friend Tim Wilson captured something of our essential divide. “This is not the end,” he said, appropriating Winston Churchill's inspirational wartime rhetoric to define our adolescent circumstances. “It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.”

Today, Tim shudders slightly at the recollection. After many years in Toronto and Kingston, he lives with his second wife, Simone, and three sons (all under the age of 5) in Bear River, N.S. (pop: 200), just down the road from Digby. He has been here since 2001, writing, editing and narrating, as he has done for 35 years, beautifully crafted documentaries for radio and television from a basement studio.

We are standing on a porch overlooking the river and the babbling brook that runs along his property. His sons are playing in the woodpile. Other former classmates may live in more bucolic settings, but I doubt it.

The quote seems too arch by half, Tim says, sipping his wine. Only in hindsight, I suggest. It was entirely apt for the moment.

That moment is gone, however, and now the Class of '65 — Canada's first baby boomers (a phrase, of course, that had not then been coined) — stands poised, precariously, on the brink of 60.

“I have a problem,” says my old friend Harold Arkin, a former corporate and commercial lawyer who now does mediation work in Toronto. “Outside, I've grown old. People call me ‘sir.' But I still feel as if I'm in my 20s or 30s. I don't know what's happened. Time has passed.”

And time is passing. “I don't need more toys,” echoes Joe Barnsley, one of Winnipeg's leading commercial lawyers. “I need more time. It's my only regret — that time passes so quickly.”

For the Me Generation, one that has long had things pretty much its own, self-indulgent way, the spectre of Time's winged chariot hurrying near is not a happy one. It's a phone call in the night that cannot be ignored. No one reaches 60 without intimations of mortality. Discs bulge, knees creak, the heart races inexplicably. We had best not speak about the hair. Inescapably, we confront the beginning of the end.

Closing exercises, indeed.

What became of us, this first class of first boomers, these Dojacks and Curries, these Teskeys and Penners? Did our lives measure up to our early promise and ambition? What happened, asks Gillian Watts, a star of Kelvin's team on the quiz show Reach for the Top and now a trade-book editor in Toronto, to our brave idealism, our conviction — our anthem — that to change the world, all you really need is love? How did Cat Stevens' universal Peace Train get so easily derailed? How were we affected by the great social currents that washed across the decades — feminism and the sexual revolution, war and the environment, fitness and religion — movements that we sometimes played a major role in shaping?

If old age, as Philip Roth says in Everyman, his latest novel, is not a battle, but a massacre, how prepared are we for retirement and its aftermath? And what sort of legacy will we, the first boomers, be charged with leaving — we, the advance guard of a demographic tsunami that threatens to engulf Canada's underfunded health-care and pension systems?

I have spent the past several weeks posing those questions. On an enviable journalistic assignment, I tracked down and interviewed former classmates, some of whom I had not seen for years. Many of them are still in Winnipeg, starting to wind down careers that have been, by any measure, very successful. No less auspiciously, others have moved farther afield — to Toronto, the West and East Coasts, Denver, San Francisco, Hong Kong and Israel.

Success, of course, confers no immunity from trauma. Almost everyone has absorbed their share of suffering: alcoholism, depression, infidelity, divorce, the loss of loved ones, medical crises. But the level of personal achievement is singularly impressive.

A survey of 24 subjects hardly qualifies as statistically compelling, yet a surprising degree of consensus emerged from our talks. With few exceptions, members of my Kelvin class believe in a supreme being, but seldom go to church or synagogue. They endorse the feminist awakening, but feel it hasn't gone far enough. They consume nothing more potent than alcohol (and, beyond some early flirtations with marijuana, have never been tempted to try more powerful hallucinogens). They watch their diet, but aren't obsessive about fitness. They regard global warming as worrisome, but aren't convinced of its cause. They describe themselves as optimists tainted, paradoxically, with a healthy streak of cynicism. And they do not intend to go gently into the good night of retirement.

As veteran radio broadcaster Roger Currie says, “If our generation has anything to say about it, two words will be stricken from the language: ‘senior' and ‘retirement.' ” Roger may be his own best evidence; he has just taken a new job as morning newsman at Regina's CKRM.

Almost everyone I spoke to said they were generally content with what they had achieved, except my contrarian friend John Teskey, now a prominent cardiac and thoracic surgeon in St. Cloud, Minn. John was one of those wizards who could have been anything — writer, politician, stand-up comic, rodeo cowboy.

“What haven't you done?” I ask him in Winnipeg. “You've saved thousands of lives.”

John smiles. “What haven't I done? Everything else.”

My oldest friend (we met when we were 3), Rob Smithen, has already retired — three years ago. An actuary, he had been chief financial officer of both Manulife and Canada Life and deftly navigated their shift from mutualized to public companies.

His decision to walk away from the corporate world wasn't simply based on financial means, but on rigorous self-knowledge. “I'm a very intense guy,” he says. “That's hard on me and it's hard on people around me. It was taking its toll. And my family medical history wasn't so great [Rob's dad had a serious heart attack in his 40s]. So I always knew I would retire early.”

Now, indulging late-boomer interests, Rob plays an enthusiastic game of golf, spends a month in Maui every year, remains active on various Toronto corporate and community boards and has developed a new passion — owning racehorses. His latest acquisition is River Heights, a three-year-old gelding, sentimentally named for the Winnipeg neighbourhood from which Kelvin's student body sprang.

For other boomers, retirement is more problematic. The high-energy Kathy Broderick, who teaches gerontology and swimming at York University, says she can afford to retire, but can't see the logic. “I don't really want to retire. I still love what I do.”

An athlete since she was born, Kathy used to carry track hurdles home from Kelvin, then set them up at 11 p.m. when there was no street traffic and practise for an hour. She went on to teach basketball and field hockey at four Canadian universities and co-coached Canada's women's field hockey team from utter obscurity to three consecutive Olympics.

Today, she swims, plays golf, still runs 10 kilometres five times a week and — I can testify — isn't breathing hard at the end. “A lot of boomers are in denial about aging,” she says, “but it's gonna happen. And just like the boomers changed the sixties and the seventies and the eighties, they'll change the way people age.”

The droll Harold Arkin likes to joke that he's working “not on the Freedom 55 plan, but the Freedom 85 plan. I could ask my first cousin [Onex chairman and billionaire] Gerry Schwartz [for help], but I don't think he wants to affect my independence.”

Pat McCallum, three years away from being able to retire with a full pension, isn't sure whether she'll exercise the option. “I can't imagine what I'd do,” the Winnipeg hospital executive says. “It scares the daylights out of me.”

Given his current touring schedule, retirement isn't much on the mind of the school's most famous alumnus — rock idol Neil Young. Neil, alas, did not actually graduate — at least not in 1965. We claim him nonetheless. He spent almost five years at Kelvin (he took Grades 10 and 11 twice), was the first boomer in Winnipeg to wear his hair long, and infamously drove to school in an old hearse.

My classmate Joe Barnsley, once a pretty mean banjo player, insists that he taught Neil how to finger-pick a guitar. “I knew finger-picking because I was heavily into folk music, but Neil hadn't seen much of it at that point,” recalls Barnsley, who says the instrument he mainly plays these days is his stereo. “He was plucking with the pick. Well, after about 20 minutes, he was better than I was.”

These tales may be apocryphal, but John Teskey insists that he was the first to demonstrate to Young the rock 'n' roll potential of the harmonica. “Barnsley brought him over to my house one day and I played the harmonica for him,” Teskey recalls, “and I swear, some light went on for him. It was something he hadn't thought of before. You could see it in his eyes.”

Young still maintains a friendship with another Kelvin alumnus, Jack Harper, who played drums in one of Neil's first bands, the Squires.

Harper is reluctant to discuss their friendship, but when I ask him what it was that made Young a success — raw talent, burning ambition or sheer, single-minded will — he says, “All of the above and good fortune.”

Harper, newly retired as head of the University of Manitoba's faculty of physical education and recreational studies, and married to the same woman, Kelvinite Pat Preston, for 37 years, won a track scholarship to the University of North Dakota in 1965, and trained the school's hockey team.

But his immigration visa was a little sketchy and in December, 1967, at the very height of the Vietnam War draft, he was inducted into the U.S. Army. The induction notice may have violated regulations exempting university students, not to mention that Harper was blind in his right eye, had 20-200 vision in the left and a gimpy knee — but he was promptly ordered to report to Fort Benning, Ga. Only the timely intervention of political allies in Manitoba saved him from a trip to Southeast Asia.

“I lost several friends in the war . . . I connected personally to it,” Harper wrote to me in a recent e-mail message, before setting off on a five-month excursion to the West Coast. “I had a close friend who fell in love with a woman at UND whose husband had been missing in action for about three years. She was terrified he might return and terrified that he wouldn't. These things really make you think.”

All my former classmates can tell stories like this, stories that collide in one way or another with the boomer issues and values that rippled through the decades. Sometimes, the impact was direct and personal, like the time an alumnus and his male partner were denied a rental apartment because they were gay. Sometimes, the encounter was with the implacable world at large.

In that context, I think of Pat Mooney, stricken at the age of 12 with Stargardt's disease, a youthful form of macular degeneration. He lost his mother when he was 15 and, faring poorly at Kelvin, dropped out in 1965 to attend a United Nations youth seminar in Vienna — “the commies,” he laughs.

Today, he's one of the world's pre-eminent experts on genetic diversity in agriculture. Based in Ottawa, and legally blind, Pat navigates his way from one international conference to another, campaigning to preserve the Earth's diminishing storehouse of seeds and to ameliorate the impact of new technologies on rural societies.

This month, Kelvin finally recognized Mooney's achievement and granted him an honorary diploma.

Before leaving on a speech-making tour of four European nations, Pat told me that in 1975, the world's farmers bought seeds from about 7,000 enterprises, not one of which owned half of 1 per cent of the global market. Today, 10 companies own half the market.

“And for all the talk that this arrangement will feed the hungry, it never does. Our generation started out with such optimism, a sense that we could do anything, and we didn't do very much. We should have seen global warming coming and we didn't,” he says.

“Poverty is worse, despite the bullshit that comes out of UN agencies. And in addition to the reality of poverty, the gap between rich and poor is wider than ever. The convergence of economic power is vast and dangerous. We blew a huge opportunity. The real question is why did all of that progressive talk from the sixties go nowhere? Where did all of the progressive people go?”

“And what's the answer?” I ask Mooney.

“I honestly don't know,” he says. “I think people just got sucked into the system, got diverted.”

One who didn't was Brian Knudsen, an animal population ecologist based in Winnipeg. Brian spent three summers as a graduate student living in James Bay monitoring polar bears, and the raw, Spartan challenge of the experience shaped his life. “I've been almost pathologically incapable of plugging into the suburban, pursuit of money and possessions scene,” he says when we meet for coffee. “I got used to living in a plywood shack and I haven't been able to stop.”

Indeed, when he came back to “civilization” from the North, he actually lived in a teepee outside the city, reading Alan Watts and Gary Snyder by the light of a kerosene lamp. When he was in his 40s, Brian — never an athlete — took up running and martial arts, making Zen philosophy “a more important part of my life. Of course, I had wanted a spiffy car, a nice house, but that was based on the misguided belief system on which I was raised.”

Now divorced, with three grown children from a 29-year marriage, Knudsen says: “I've got a government pension, a couple of saxophones and guitars, a great dog and a wonderful girlfriend. I haven't got a pot to piss in, but I don't care.”

It's a very odd thing to see old classmates after 40 years. In many ways, they are exactly as I remember them, right down to subtle mannerisms. What's different is their confidence. All the high-school inhibitions are gone. It no longer matters what other people think. This is what I am. This is my opinion. You're welcome to take it or leave it.

“I was a terrible student,” Pat McCallum confesses to me in Winnipeg. “I skipped school every other day. Eventually, I dropped out. All I wanted to do was get out, marry my boyfriend, and have kids.” So she married at 20, and went to secretarial school, but four years later her husband was dead of leukemia.

When she started dating again, she discovered that the world had changed. “The sexual revolution — unbelievable. It was a real culture shock for me. I'd only been with one man. Suddenly, there was an expectation that there'd be sex on the first date. I couldn't handle that.”

A few years later, she married one of her late husband's best friends, but that union foundered.

Then Pat had an epiphany. Working in administration at Winnipeg's Health Sciences Centre, she recognized that hospitals would soon have to compete for money and would need executives who knew something about marketing. At 28, she finally conquered Grade 12 math, then went back to university for a four-year commerce degree, while working as a cocktail waitress by night. “I was so goddamned determined to do that. It was like a bad temper, almost.”

She never did have children, but for the past 14 years, McCallum has run the entire fundraising program for Winnipeg's Victoria Hospital.

Jim and Morna Cook have their own saga of triumph over adversity. In Grade 12, Jim was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour and given heavy doses of radiation; he recovered, became a successful chartered accountant, learned to fly a plane and ran 10 marathons. His resting pulse rate is 54 and he's as lean as he was at 17.

Because of the radiation, having children was deemed inadvisable, but he and Morna (née Fleury), a pharmacist, have been happily together 37 years, sharing a small house on what she calls “the poor side” of Wellington Crescent (not backing onto the Assiniboine River), Winnipeg's finest street. Now semi-retired and active on various community boards, they use their free time to buy and sell real estate, doing the fix-ups themselves.

But success has not clouded their view about the world's have-nots. “Technologically and materially, we've made huge strides,” Morna says. “But we were the generation that said ‘make love not war' and we've failed terribly. Socially we've crapped out. We haven't taken the time to look after the less advantaged. And that will bite us.”

The same boomer pattern holds for Ken Lazaruk: personal accomplishment offset by rising concern about events beyond one's control. “We've been very lucky,” he says. “We boomers were the chosen ones. But the trends that are happening — terrorism, the risk of plague. I tell you, it scares me.”

The son of an abusive alcoholic, Ken resolved early on to make his father a role model of what not to be. Some of his best positive role models were teachers, so he became one, taught for 30 years in the Winnipeg school system, including seven at R.B. Russell, a tough inner-city institution. It was, he says, his most rewarding assignment. “We had it all — drugs, prostitution, suicides. I was a guidance counsellor so that's what I was dealing with. But it made my life much richer. It opened my eyes to things.”

At the same time, Ken used his summers off to rise steadily through the ranks to become a head referee in the Canadian Football League. Now retired from teaching, he's beginning his fourth decade as a ref, having overseen more than 500 games. “My ambitions were to become a head referee, to referee a Grey Cup as head, and own a house in River Heights. I've done all that. But I'd be nothing without my wife. My father was domineering. Charlotte and I are equal partners.”

A few days before meeting Ken, I have dinner with Bill Merrett. As a youth, Bill was a black-haired sharpie, emotionally volatile, and a prankster. He once put fish in Kelvin's water system. During his third year in commerce at the University of Manitoba — in a moment of utter despair over a relationship — he shot himself in the navel. When he woke up, he was a paraplegic. He stopped counting after 35 rounds of surgery but, despite his disability, managed to earn a law degree and become a senior director of Legal Aid Manitoba.

Today, although his hair is almost white and he lives in constant pain, he's still vigorous and alert, with great upper-body strength. “Of course I've been reacting to the accident from that moment on,” Bill says. “I became very pissed off at having set myself back and very determined not to roll over.”

I want to press him for details — and yet I can't. Bill fixes me with a smile and says: “It did resolve a great philosophical question — to be or not to be. Well, the answer is to be.”

The core Judeo-Christian values of south Winnipeg, circa 1965, were so widely shared, our conservative mores so homogeneous as to make River Heights claustrophobic for some.

“I was always an artist and always sure I would be an artist,” recalls painter Michaele Jordana Berman, now living in Toronto. “I'd been to the Banff school of fine arts at age 12 and 13. But in Winnipeg, in that milieu, there was no room for me to be different, to be who I really thought I was. I resented everybody. I knew I was destined for something and I had to find it.”

She did: Berman eventually sold one painting (of a dying, beached whale) to the National Gallery of Canada, another to the Canada Council Art Bank, mounted dozens of one-woman shows, and in the 1970s, was lead singer for a punk band, The Poles, produced by her husband, Doug Pringle.

Another classmate, Gillian Watts, says she was “so unhappy in high school I spent most of my teenage years depressed. Partly it was the WASPy culture. It wasn't until I went into therapy in my late 20s, a very boomer thing to do, that I turned into me. I was in primal therapy. I screamed for a year. I had so much pent-up anger.”

Today, living with her second husband and 20-year-old son, her black hair cut in almost the same page-boy style it was in high school, Watts is the very model of boomerdom: She bicycles, gardens, takes yoga classes, but avoids organized religion. “I envy people who have faith because I feel a lack of capacity for it,” she says. “I've tried to look at things in a Buddhist way, even Wicca, for Pete's sake. It all seems really nice, but I just can't buy into it. I know it sounds Miss America-ish, but I really believe in people.”

Our parents might have had good cause to stifle their emotions. They had weathered the indignities of the Great Depression and the carnage of the Second World War and managed through no small effort to raise us in middle-class comfort and safety. Most were small businessmen and middle managers, struggling to get by. We were, in every sense, their beneficiaries, and only in retrospect can we see how privileged we were.

“They endured a war far worse than anything we have seen to protect freedom,” Joe Barnsley says. “They then allowed us that freedom to live far different lives than their generation. Maybe any credit lies with them.”

Still, by high school, the cocoons of certitude in which we had been nurtured were already beginning to fracture. The Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War: Even in an isolated prairie outpost like Winnipeg, these events pressed heavily on our consciousness. When I asked my friend Ken Skinner, now a successful Winnipeg dentist, what impact John Kennedy's death had had on him, he started to cry. Forty-three years after the event, the mere memory of the day — Nov. 22, 1963 — remains profoundly unsettling. “I watched my classmates dissolve,” he recalls, tears welling in his eyes. “They went to pieces right in front of me. It seemed like hope for a new world crashed. That was a real dose of reality for young people.”

Rob Smithen also remembers being “overwhelmed emotionally. It was like my parents died. Can you imagine that reaction happening today — with any politician?”

The end of my own innocence, my sense that life's balance might rest on an unreliable fulcrum, came in a quite different way, at the close of an otherwise perfect June day, that same year. I was 16. Double-dating — a quaint social ritual of the time — Ellie and I had driven to a party in the city's north end. There was slow dancing in the tiled basement — Johnny Mathis, Tommy Edwards — and lemonade on the patio swing, and eventually it was time to go.

But when we pulled up at her home around midnight, an RCMP cruiser was parked outside, and I walked her to the door with a dark premonition. Suddenly, without a word, she was gone. A constable took her from me and gently bade me goodnight and I drove home, trembling, to tell my parents what the morning news would confirm: Ellie's older brother, just 19, returning with friends from a driving trip to California, was dead on a highway in Alberta. The shock waves of that evening are with me to this day.

But if the planet at large loomed as an increasingly dangerous place, we boomers were nonetheless imbued with a sense of personal confidence about the future, a collective conviction, somehow borne in our blood, that the world was ours for the taking. For most of us, there was never any doubt that while continuing to live at home, we would earn university degrees (average annual tuition fees at the University of Manitoba in 1965: $350), find jobs with good prospects in our chosen professions, marry, raise children and live well. Our optimism — the sense of unbounded possibility — was almost contagious. And if the first career choice proved less than satisfying, you would simply find a new one, an option that was rarely available to our parents.

Harold Arkin and Gilliam Watts both spent two years in architecture before deciding they were ill suited to the profession. Gillian went into curatorial studies, Harold into law. Rob Smithen spent one miserable year in medicine, a career choice for which he had long been programmed, finished near the top of his class, and then left for commerce. After raising two daughters and divorcing, Marion Korn went to law school, became a family lawyer at 40, and now runs her firm out of an art gallery (Toronto Free) that she founded.

In Boomerland, reinvention can occur at any time. Just this month, my classmate Doug Kirkaldy, a CBC broadcaster for 37 years, quit his job, remarried, sold his house and moved from Toronto to Halifax, to teach journalism at King's College. “We boomers,” Doug says, “are at once the most fortunate and the most spoiled generation.”

Or what about Fred Penner? Yes, that Fred Penner, the children's entertainer, with whom I once shared a stage, albeit in the only dimly remembered (even by me) 1964 Kelvin production of Gilbert & Sullivan's Ruddigore. Quiet and self-effacing, a mediocre student at best (it took him five years to finish), Fred would have been among the last to predict that he would host his own show on CBC television for nine years, sell more than a million CDs, write a thousand songs, and be named to the Order of Canada.

At university, he had studied economics and psychology, courses aimed at obtaining a bureaucrat's job at Central Mortgage and Housing. “That's what I thought I was going to do. I was very passive — my wife would say passive aggressive. I had no aspirations. I rarely went after anything in my career.”

But the deaths of his father, a former army officer, and younger sister within six months from 1970 to 1971 focused his attention and he started performing. Thirty-four years later, he's still at it, and says he'll continue as long as his health holds out. “I don't do anything else, really,” he says with characteristic self-effacement. “I write music, I sing a bit, I walk the dog and I flounder.”

Fred and his wife, Odette, married for 29 years, have four children.

But while his own achievements have far outstripped anything he once thought possible, Penner, too, thinks boomers in general first abandoned, then disgraced, the values we so noisily espoused in the 1960s. “We were in a beautiful position. There was a cohesiveness that you really felt, an open-door policy. But it turned out not to be peace and love. I think boomers discovered they could make a lot of money selling products to other boomers and greed took over.”

Fred's own career, he acknowledges, has been based on selling music to the children of boomers, a division of the entertainment industry that did not exist until he, Raffi, and Sharon, Lois and Bram came along. “Then the world got crazier and we felt the need to protect our families, so you're not tithing any more — you're hoarding. The walls go up and you become numb. So the planet is in serious trouble and in a way, it's our fault. Look at the obscene salaries paid to senior corporate executives. Well, those are the boomers. Don't these people remember the dream?”

Fred lives in leafy River Heights, just up the street from my old friend Wynn Sweatman. Wynn, who still looks about 45, spent four years teaching before realizing that the classroom could not provide him with the quality of life he was seeking. He turned to insurance sales and has since built a thriving practice that embraces all aspects of financial and estate planning. He and Teddi, his wife of 37 years, and two of their five children (the other three, grown, are living away) share a lovely, two-storey, traditional centre-hall home a few blocks from where Wynn grew up, as well as a cottage at Lake of the Woods where they spend virtually every weekend from May to Thanksgiving.

A few weeks ago, the Sweatmans invited me to what became a long, liquid dinner with two other old friends, Richard Bracken and Doug Abra. We started with drinks at 6 o'clock and five hours later, the sirloin steaks and lemon meringue pie just a memory, we were still at it.

Richard, grandson of former Manitoba premier John Bracken, was Kelvin's gentleman sports hero, a gifted athlete. After graduation, he went to Princeton and became the first sophomore tailback in 30 years to be named to the school's Varsity football squad, as well as its captain. Good-looking and well-mannered, he was one of the few people I have known about whom no one could find a single bad thing to say. In his fourth year, Princeton's 2,800-member (then) all-male student body voted him its highest honour, Best Man, an award that recognized overall integrity, character and mettle.

Later, he took an MBA at Harvard, and returned to Winnipeg to play for the CFL's Blue Bombers, a boyhood dream. But during his first training camp, he decided that his heart wasn't truly in it. Instead, he joined the brokerage business and recently celebrated his third decade as president of Royal Canadian Securities, a private investment fund.

He might well have had his own political career — the Conservatives wooed him a couple of times. But like Wynn Sweatman, he regarded the call of family and community as more important. He and his late wife, Kathryn, who died last fall of leukemia, raised four college-educated sons, three of whom now reside in the United States.

Richard acknowledges what he calls a “half-regret” — that he opted to play big fish in Winnipeg's smaller economic pond, instead of tackling Wall Street as many of his Harvard classmates had done. But he personally feels it was the right decision. “I'm not a global guy,” he explains. “I wasn't so concerned about where the world was going, where Canada was going, where Manitoba was going. I was concerned about where the Bracken family was going.”

Doug Abra took an arts degree, spent a year teaching in Venezuela, then went to law school. He was a Crown attorney for many years, then (with partner Dave Hill) set up a firm that became one of Winnipeg's leading civil litigators.

Tempted to practise in Toronto or Calgary, Abra says his lifestyle in Winnipeg is superior to anything he could have elsewhere. “My reputation is not national, which it might have been if I had left, but I have a good practice. It's gone very well. I've enjoyed myself.”

Doug proved to have the best memory of the night, recalling even the details of an early manifestation of boomer political activism — an abortive strike staged by our class in Grade 11, in protest over the cancellation of field day.

At one point in the evening, John Teskey called from St. Cloud to say hello. John was always among the brightest of the bright. In high school, he read four books a week — in addition to the course load. “I was either going to be a doctor or a cowboy,” he told me a few days earlier, during one of his many trips north from St. Cloud to visit his sons and younger brother. “I'm still not sure I made the right choice.”

After graduation, John was an instant star in the Winnipeg medical firmament, working as a surgeon at St. Boniface Hospital. In the mid-1970s, he was scheduled to operate on an aboriginal woman whose hobby was beading. In the days preceding the surgery, he had dropped by to visit and, on one occasion, joked that they both were sewers — only he used stitches.

On the day of the operation, needing a bead-like device to cinch the outside suture, he decided to use a few of the woman's beads. A mighty political brouhaha ensued, and John, the least culturally insensitive person anyone knew, was accused of committing cultural rape — ridiculed on Saturday Night Live, deluged with hate mail and summoned before a Manitoban Human Rights panel, chaired by Mr. Justice Emmett Hall.

“I was so nervous, I spilled my coffee on him,” John recalls with a laugh. But it wasn't funny at the time. And the furor dragged on for two years. The bead incident wasn't the only reason he eventually became part of the talent drain of doctors to the States, but it was a factor. “I think it was my first encounter with political correctness,” John says. “And it's become a new religion. But if she had been a Portuguese beader, honestly, I would have done the same thing.”

Later, as the Scotch continued to flow around the Sweatman dining-room table, I suggest the possibility that our children would find the world a tougher place to navigate than we had — more competition for jobs, more difficulty finding affordable housing, to say nothing of the growing threats posed by terrorism, infectious diseases and global climate change. Wynn demurs. Those things are partly true, he conceded, but they don't constitute the core issue.

“I think the problem today is not that the price of housing is too high, but that the fabric of family and devotion to certain principles is missing,” he says. “I think we have a value system that still connects us — Doug and Richard and I and others — 40 years later, and I don't think that exists in the younger generation. I worry about that. Marriage is more expendable. Politically, our kids have fewer commitments than we did. In our case, it was a lack of awareness [about the political process]; now, it's a lack of respect. Those are the things that are going to present a much bigger challenge than the cost of a goddamn house.”

Wynn says his own biggest regret is that “three of our five children live in other cities. Somehow we were not successful in selling them on life in Winnipeg. We encouraged them to be self-reliant. Now, we're afraid we won't see enough of them.”

So what of our boomer legacy? What will our sons and daughters say about us, perhaps the best educated, healthiest and most affluent age cohort in history? That we had everything handed to us and, staggering scientific and technological innovation aside, did so little to address the core issues that menace humanity: poverty, drug trafficking, AIDS, global warming? Even those fronts on which we did make dramatic progress — gender equity and gay rights — were ultimately, it might be argued, driven by self-interest.

The measured Joe Barnsley is less dyspeptic. “Why would anybody bother judging us,” he asks. “We're just a blip on the line. We have our warts and blemishes, certainly, but over all I don't think we've set up any irreparable roadblocks to where the world wants to turn.”

Others disagree. “We're leaving less belief in the power structures,” says Gillian Watts, “less knee-jerk respect for authority. This may be a bad thing, because people don't vote any more. Something bad happened in the eighties, all that materialism. I think we showered our kids with an unhealthy sense of entitlement.”

Pat Mooney has a different take. “In the sixties, we thought we could do whatever we damned well pleased, change things,” she says. “I don't sense that any more. That may be our legacy — the passivity.”

But maybe it's too soon for verdicts. The fat lady is still doing her warm-ups. Life expectancy rates are rising. With luck, many boomers may make it to 80. That's 20 more years for the first of us — a quarter of a lifetime, an entire continent to be explored, or at least a peninsula.

The story of Tim Wilson, Kelvin's valedictorian, may be relevant here. Six years ago, he had a terrifying near-death experience, when doctors in Kingston botched a gallstone operation. He was in the hospital for seven weeks, delirious much of the time, given up for dead more than once. Out of work for a year, he had to cash in the equity in his home to feed his family and, not long after he arrived in Bear River, with one young son and another on the way, was down to his last 69 cents. Of his decision to embark on a second family in his mid-50s (Tim has two daughters from previous relationships), he says, “Thank God I'm getting another chance to get it right.”

Another chance to get it right: Maybe it's not too late for wayward boomers after all.

In his hospital delirium, Tim recalls, he started seeing visions and heard choirs of angels singing. But when it was over, he “felt like several layers of skin had been pulled off me. It was an experience of seeing into the radiance of things. I felt, as Yeats says in his poem, Vacillation, ‘that I was blessed and could bless.' It was liberating. I thought, ‘Live your life. Live your life. This is the only time you have.' ”

I'll drink to that, Tim. Let's all drink to that.

Michael Posner is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.