High School Reunion
Seeing Old Friends… Fifty Years On!
What do you say to that old friend you have not seen in half a century? What do you say to an entire roomful of such friends?
These questions are only hypothetical if you plan to skip your 50-year high school reunion. If, on the other hand, you decide to attend, you’ll face the very real prospect of staring into the face of a 68-year-old woman, who definitely looks familiar, a face you’re sure you should recognize, only to glance at the nametag she’s wearing and realize, to your chagrin and supreme embarrassment, that she was your Jr. Prom date!
Talk tended to quickly revert back to those things we knew we shared in common:
“Remember how you put mag-wheels on your Ford Pinto to make it look cooler?”
“Yes; and do you remember how you put a racing-stripe on your old, green ‘54 Ford, using yellow masking-tape?”
“And didn’t one of us shoot a hole through the roof of his dad’s pickup cab with a .22 pistol; and didn’t we try to fix it?”
“And didn’t one of you throw raw eggs at my house one night, for whatever reason?”
“Oh, and did I really come to your house on another night to return the favor?”
The more we reminisced, the more we realized what incredibly dumb things we did back then. In our defense, we were still 17-years old, and teenagers are notoriously irresponsible, and, well… dumb.
No less than five different people came up to me to personally apologize for having been “such a jerk” back in high school. My response to each of them was the same: “Weren’t we all jerks back then?”
Too harsh? Perhaps.
But, to a greater or lesser extent, we were—all of us—somewhere on the continuum of that sliding ‘Jerk’ scale. It’s inescapable; we were teenagers with teenage brains that were still not fully formed. (Case in point: 15 years after graduation, when my brain had matured enough to begin to recognize insight and introspection, I felt compelled to search for my old high school English teacher’s phone number, so I could call and apologize for my contemptibly jerky behavior in her class. Did she remember me after 15 years? Unfortunately, yes.)
Back then, our understanding and our perspectives were so limited. We were simply too young, and had experienced so precious little of real life, and of the lessons that life tends to teach.
Fifty years later, however, not a single one of us had been spared the hard, humbling, horizon-broadening lessons that mortality doles out to all of us.
I wanted to tell our old head-cheerleader not to worry about those deep lines and wrinkles on that once fresh and lovely face; she’d earned every one of those age-lines and should wear them proudly. And I wanted to tell the guy who quarterbacked our football team—a cocksure and impressive physical specimen back then—not to worry about the changes in his body; he was now a cancer survivor and should realize that what he’s lost in physical fitness and prowess, he’s gained in the deeply knowing and wizened look in his eyes. He understands things now that he could never have fathomed way back then.
We were together for less than two hours—enough time to revisit some of the old memories and stories—what Bruce Springsteen terms, “Glory Days”—but not nearly enough time to plumb the depths of what is really going on in each other’s lives: the tragic death of a friend’s soldier son; the liver transplant of another; the fellow who’s been his fragile mother’s caregiver for the past 10 years; the mental health challenges; the ailments and the physical infirmities.
Two hours was barely enough time to play a few songs from the 70s over a tinny intercom speaker, swap a couple of threadbare stories from those bygone days, and have someone take a cellphone photo of the old gang.
In the weeks since our get-together, I’ve wondered about a possible 60-year reunion, and whether I would attend if our senior class of ‘76 planned one…
Maybe. But probably not. We are no longer the same people we were. Besides, half of us would likely have passed from this world by then; and the remaining half would be even less recognizable than we are now.
And, besides, I have already made my restitution: offering a blanket apology to all in attendance at our 50th, for my thoughtless 17-year-old behavior…
“Sorry, everyone, for my having been such an incorrigible jerk!