PROM AND CIRCUMSTANCE
I feel twenty-six. I get up early in the morning and swim at the local Y. If it's nice outside, I walk or play tennis. Then I work until late at night. I have a lot of energy and I feel like a million dollars. I haven't seen a doctor in thirty five years, not once, not for anything, and I have no plans to - and I hope I won't have to.
However, my forty fifth high school reunion is this summer. Where did the time go??? How did I get to be this old?? I keep asking myself - and others. "I haven't the foggiest idea," most of them tell me.
I didn't attend the last three reunions. I wasn't the least bit interested. I figured that anyone with whom I had wanted to stay in touch, I had - and the others - well, they didn't really matter much in the scheme of my life. Besides, I was very busy raising my three children and doing important work on the planet, right? Reunions were "Priority Z." I know that if I psychoanalyzed the reasons why I wasn't going, I wouldn't like them, and so, I didn't.
I had gone to my tenth reunion, happy to have a wedding ring on my finger and a husband in tow. Glad to have two children by then. I didn't recognize a few people who came over to me and when I found out who they were, I wondered how ten years could alter someone so dramatically. Or maybe, I wasn't really paying attention between 1962 and '65, preoccupied with book reports, homework assignments and dating. There were a few people with whom I had been friends in high school who had also come to the reunion, and I mostly sat at the table talking to them; a bit boring after having caught up on everyone's news, but safe. I saw the skinny boy who had sat next to me in German class (who takes German in high school? I now think, and why the fart didn't I take Spanish?!)and who seemed uncomfortable in his own skin; he had certainly filled out and grown into his nose. He appeared quite self-assured and I learned that he had already become extraordinarily financially successful. Sehr gut(that's all the German I can remember). I fantasized about him for months after that night.
When time came for the next reunions, I quickly nixed any idea of going. I didn't want to sit in a dressy outfit among people who had never known each other dressy. I thought we should wear school type clothes - come to think of it, we even survived a dress code back then. I didn't want to push roasted chicken and potatoes around a dinner plate - I was in my vegetarian stage. We hadn't sat down for roasted anything when we were together in high school - we ate sandwiches and potato chips. No one was lactose intolerant, and we drank milk out of little waxed plastic containers. It appeared that no one was allergic to peanuts in those days and the entire cafeteria with its long, rectangular, gray-green tables wreaked of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches -- actually, if memory serves, it just wreaked, period. I wanted us to have a barbecue on Horseneck Beach, like we did the last day of school. I hated the band that played loud, unfamiliar music, as if playing songs that were popular years later might make US a bit younger. The music was so loud, no one could hear themselves talk. I wanted a great DJ who knew what had happened during our years at NBHS (most notably, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy) and played songs that we had all loved and danced to in high school. I wanted time in between the songs to talk to people - to find out what they were doing, where they lived - you know, important information like that.
In fact, I went to my husband's twenty-fifth reunion. I sat at a table with spouses who, like me, had not gone to that high school. Although I knew a number of Paul's high school friends, still, I wasn't a Durfee-ite - our high schools had been long-time rivals for the Thanksgiving Day football game. The "kids" who had gone to Durfee were in circles, reminiscing and laughing. Every now and then, we would see someone double over. When that happened in high school, it was most likely due to alcohol consumption. This time, it was because they couldn't catch their breath laughing about some teacher who's name was Miss Morse and whom they'd dubbed Mish Mash. The rest of us, the outsiders, passed the night away as best we could given that we didn't know one another and most likely wouldn't ever see one another again ( except at the next reunion?), discussing our children and homes, and any other subject that we could cook up when the silence between us was a bit too uncomfortable. I vowed never to go to another "somebody else's" reunion ever again. I told my husband that the next time his alma mater hosted a reunion, he was on his own.
And he was, as we divorced, amicably, soon after. I had always believed that we would be the LAST couple to ever separate and my dream of the little house with the bright-white picket fence - well, sadly, it faded. My ex told me, however, that his reunion was at a hotel at which there were a number of gatherings going on simultaneously. He walked into one room filled with older people, and immediately knew he was at the wrong function. As it turned out, that WAS his class reunion. "Everyone looked so old," he told me, " I couldn't for the life of me believe that was MY graduating class!"
Okay, so here's the point of this whole piece: I'm not only going to my 45th reunion, I'm looking forward to it. How could this be so, given the curmudgeonly attitude I have adopted over the past years about reunions in general? What ideology has transformed inside of me that I could be so enthusiastic? Maybe it's ego - I'm told I look well and I'm successful in my work. Maybe it's a longing to go back to simpler - but, were they simpler I ask? - times. Maybe it's an attempt to bring my father back - I loved him so and he wasn't dead when I was in high school. There are so many maybes, some of which may hold some weight (as I imagine many of us do, now that we are ... gulp ... in our sixties) and some of which may be a product of my still-creative imagination.
A good friend of mine has no interest in going to any of his reunions, high school or otherwise. He says the only reason people go is to see how their life stacked up in comparison to everyone else. "Basically, it's just a competition," he says. (I think about that - would I be as interested in going if I'd put on thirty pounds or hair dye wasn't readily available?) He cannot understand the delightful anticipation I feel as I contact a number of old chums (lets get this straight - even I'm not old enough to use that term, "chum," ever -- it was tongue in cheek!) and am contacted by some as well. He doesn't know, by the way, that my first high school boyfriend is one of the people who has already died of a heart attack and as I anticipate the reunion, I am in a type of mourning for him -- and that I realize more and more that more and more of us will not be around for the next reunions. He doesn't know that I want to go in the heart space that I am in now - - without nearly as much judgment as I might have had then due perhaps to a tad of insecurity - and to really BE with these people who grew up at the same time that I did and who took the same classes I did and who understood that WHERE we lived, where we grew up, actually molded us as well as the teachers that we had did. What I myself realize is that I am still that same young girl inside myself, searching for who I am, who I am yet to become, and that these older but familiar faces hold a piece of the answer for me.
I look forward to going to this reunion, as well, because I want to visit my home town. I want to see the hospital where I was born, the first house I lived in, and then the second. I want a time put aside when I remember my grandmother, my aunt, the old lady we thought was a witch who lived in the house three doors away and who only peeked through her curtains and wouldn't even give out any candy on Halloween. I want to drive by the elementary school I went to, and the junior high. Even as I type this, I begin to remember the routes we would take and the kids whom we would pick up along the way. I am remembering the first dirty joke I was told by the boys with whom I walked to school, which I laughed at so that I would appear "cool" but which I didn't understand at all. I understand it now. I remember running for student counsel, and then being chosen - what an honor - to run off papers at the mimeograph machine when teachers needed "copies of things." I remember being ostracized by one of my closest friends when the boy she liked admitted he liked me better than her. I didn't even like him, thought he was a jerk, but she stopped talking to me anyway. The joys and the pains, four full years of them. The disappointments and triumphs.
I want review my life.
No one of us in the Class of '65 could have possibly imagined cell phones and computers and the Internet -- oh, with the exception of that tall kid, the one with big pimples (come to think of it, most everyone had big pimples back then, and now many will have big middles...not sure which was/is worse...) and his nose in a book during the three minute rush from one class to another, and his horn-rimmed glasses, which were not in fashion then, but more a sign of poverty and the lack of resources to buy real frames... I forget his last name and will have to look in my yearbook - the class nerd, although even the word "nerd" wasn't "in" in those days, and nowadays, nerd rock - I'll bet HE had a sense about all of this newfangled technological craziness. But now that there is emails and iPods and all that, classmates have a way of connecting that we've never had in the past. Every few days, we get to read a new profile, as people sign up for the reunion, or get a notice that it is so and so's birthday.
And so, when I saw that it was Mike's birthday, I sent him a greeting. He had answered the questionnaire posed to us, and he now lives in Florida. I told him that I was going to be visiting my mother, who lives only five miles from him. I told him that if he wanted to get together while I was there, to let me know. I didn't hear from him, however, until two days before I was leaving to go home. He had been having trouble with his computer and was catching up on a month of emails. He thought he had missed my visit and seemed genuinely sorry we wouldn't have a chance to meet. He left his phone number and said that the next time I was in the area, to please be in touch. I called him immediately and told him I was still around. And so, we got together.
Mike and I lived across the street from one another in New Bedford and were friendly, but not friends. We had a huge high school class, after all, we are true Baby Boomers, and we traveled in different circles. We met at a Starbucks, computers in tow, where we both tried frantically to figure out how to get onto the Internet so we could share photographs which might begin to tell our stories more quickly than words. We had such a good time, as each of us commented in "thank you" emails. It was, in some strange way, like meeting someone I HAD been very friendly with. It was - what was it - familiar, comfortable. We talked for hours, and could have talked for more. We talked about people and teachers and having our hearts broken and hope and aging and dying -- Life. It was a wonderful afternoon, with no pretenses or expectations or shields or disappointments -- and with a certain lovely vulnerability, perhaps on both ends. He said a few things that I've been thinking about - about relationships, contentment, and learning to like oneself. I wish I had known him better when we were younger, but then, would he have been the same "him" then that he is now? - and I hope to come away from this reunion wishing I had known everyone better --
including myself.
Thanks, Mike. I miss the you I didn't know and am so glad to have reconnected this week. So many "what ifs."
And I am so sorry that I didn't know, didn't pay attention, to what was going on in Viet Nam. I am embarrassed by that now. I was too busy picking out china patterns and bridesmaids' dresses. And there you were...and now I know... and I offer the support and listening - and tissues - that I should have been giving out back then.
Pretenses aren't the only thing that's gone. The loud and annoying bell that signaled the beginning of "home room" and the start and end of each class stopped signaling many years ago, when a new and improved high school was built. The building is not being used as a high school any more. In the sixties, most of us thought that huge, old, painted yellow brick building with high ceilings and dark crown moldings in every one of the classrooms was as archaic as the dinosaur. Now, as I think about it, I realize what a beautiful, gorgeous, amazing building it was. I now realize, too, that every one of the teenagers who was in that building, was amazing in his or her own right. The jocks, the nerds, the cheerleaders, the science buffs, the popular kids and the unpopular - they were all, like me, just doing their best to make their way through the maze of that enormous building (and throughout the internal edifice of pubescence, of course). Some of those kids were happy, some, including two who later ended their own lives, were not. Some I now know were gay (but who really knew about gay in those days?) Weren't we all virgins? I thought so then, but now I know different. I thought we had to be - at least that's what my mother told me. When I was in my fifties my bubble was burst when I found out that even she had a double standard.
Mike is not going to the reunion. He went to the last one and immediately sought out two classmates who had been friends of his. One drove to school with him almost every day of their senior year. Neither one of them recognized him. Sure, when they had last seen him he wasn't bald top and his hair wasn't gray, but his face really doesn't look all THAT different. Neither of these "friends" acknowledged him at all; once they looked at his name tag, there was very little of anything that could be construed as warmth. Couldn't these men have feigned a little excitement? I wondered. Mike says he doesn't want to have to endure that kind of egocentric bullshit again and I don't blame him.
Be that as it may, I am going to my high school reunion. I am so looking forward to seeing a friend who is coming in from the Midwest and if I spend the entire time talking just to her ( because no one else recognizes me), that'll be fine. I know that I risk returning to my everyday life depressed and downtrodden, wondering where all these old people in the room came from. (Answer: New Bedford, Massachusetts). But the important things have changed for me - it doesn't matter as much where someone lives as how they have learned to cope with life and be happy in their own skins...how they have overcome adversities and/or found ways to make the world a little better place for their having been here. My own life has been filled with ups, downs and sideways. I have regrets, hurts, sadnesses, failures, challenges and tragedies - as well as blessings, successes and joys. I am partly who I thought I would be, and partly so NOT who I thought I would be.
To my classmates: I hope you are still alive, and I hope to see you in August. If I didn't know you back then, please feel free to introduce yourself. Having recently seen the documentary "Food, Inc.", I'm an almost vegetarian again, so no chicken please. And if there is a DJ there, I want him - or her - times have changed! - to know that I loved the Four Seasons (yes I saw "Jersey Boys"!), The Lettermen, Johnny Mathis, Paul Anka and those guys from England. I may FEEL twenty- six, but I'm not - reverse the numbers, I'm sixty-two, and I'm glad there's a reunion and I thank everyone who is helping to make it happen.
And Mike, its still not too late... air fares are cheap around now -- or -- you could drive up the coast and arrive just in time!
