I went to my 25th high school reunion on Saturday. Of the handful of reunions our class has held over the years, it was the first I’ve managed to attend. We all know how it goes: in the fullness that becomes our every-day lives, escape to something like this might be unattainable indulgence, especially if– as many of us do– you live out of town.
Not so many of us were there on Saturday. Of the 350+ members of my graduating class, we might have been as many as 50. Rumors abounded of the last reunion– 20 years– that was held at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh and hosted over 300. I wish I had been there.
But I wasn’t counting people on Saturday night. I was too busy.
I had done no preparation. I didn’t study in advance. It might have been a good idea to leaf through our senior yearbook once again, just maybe to brush up on names. And it might have been helpful– again, via the yearbook– to try to re-enter the world that was our lives twenty-odd years ago. Is that what the yearbook is for? Instead, I entered it cold: fresh from substitute teaching at my children’s school, from the drive from North Carolina to Pennsylvania, from time with the in-laws. None of it likely to jog memory or conjure the past.
Not that we need much help. Who among us doesn’t relive those days from time to time– either voluntarily or with the help of television? Even a mental list of high school flicks will expose the obsession that it is– and why? Maybe it was a time far simpler than Now.
We can each of us look back and remember. He was the peg-leg, she the half-wit. You were moon-eyed over so-and so. Here were the definitions, like the sin and co-sin in Pre-Calculus. Isn’t that how it went?
So graduation is a mercy: after years in that centrifuge, we are sent spinning to land alone. We find our feet. We replace the peg-leg, or find it was never there. High school recedes and suddenly years have intervened: we are thirty, we are forty; we have children who are the age you were on the first day of eighth grade.
On Saturday night, I was just So Glad to see them again. And amazed at how the mind works, how the selves appeared within the faces, coming into clarity like a Polaroid. Conversation was quick and loud and never long enough. There was too much to know:
Tell me how you are. You live where? and do what? married whom? children? The questions would make me numb anywhere else, with anyone else. So much interface would exhaust me. But here she was– the girl whose locker stood next to mine for four years. For four years during which we greeted the day together, flipped through our locker combinations, intersected multiple times a day between classes. And here he was– the boy who sat in front of me in history class, who passed the papers back in dutiful submission, who bought Spree at the student store and– far too often– shared them.
We had four brief hours on Saturday night. It was high school chorus, the football field, the back of our senior English classroom, all somehow wedged into a reception room at the Garden View Hilton.
There simply wasn’t enough time. Every party ends.
I have two sisters who weathered childhood with me. Once in awhile, one of us will ask– indicating a view, an occurrence, a comment: What does this remind you of?
Always, there is a right answer.
High school wasn’t the same as that, right? Not at all. High school wasn’t family. It was just high school.
But there is something of it, I find. Like a family, we have something of the shared memory. Nothing more, perhaps, than the singular experience, the idle conversation. But we exchanged something of our Real Selves nonethless– even if it was only high school, only middle school, only Mrs. DiMarco’s class in fourth grade.
It was just high school. We grew up together. That’s all.
