A crazy silver sliver of a crescent moon shines down on me tonight, from a sky that is for once not shrouded in a misty veil of clouds. There is clarity tonight and I lift my head from the fog of a once-in-a-lifetime event that happened last night--mine and my wife's twentieth high school reunion.
I skipped out on the year five reunion, and one of the classmates I saw last night noted simply that "it sucked. The same cliques. Waste of time." Ten years was apparently a bit more of the same recipe, with a dash of the "what do you do what do you drive how large is your 401(k)". No stranger to the kitchen, I had feared as much and stayed away from both of these reunions like Willie Nelson from the IRS.
Well, twenty years has a way of making some of the world's atrocities not look so bad. High school went from mental canker sore to a mere throbbing reminiscence of chaotic conformity. What I realized yesterday, at the afternoon reunion picnic, and later at the formal reception (with standard shrimp and cheese) was that the people in high school were largely awesome, magnanimous, pimply, insecure screw-ups just like me! And now they were card-carrying adults and fantastic people. And no, not everyone worked for the government, or "in I.T". One of our classmates had not had a haircut since just before joining us senior year from another school. He literally sported dreads down to his rear end and a spirit and depth of soul as large and long as his coiffure. Others had participated in a diaspora to the corners of the contiguous states. What all had in common was a desire to genuinely know, "hey, how the hell are you?" and bother to wait for a response.
All imminence front and poseur had disappeared between years ten and twenty since our gleeful crossing of the stage to receive our rolled-up parchment passkey to life after six periods and a lunchbreak. My once proudest high school memory had been riding my bicycle from out in the sticks into town and to school on the last day of school. Now I was proudest simply to have been a part of such a great class; a class that absorbed me and many others in a county boundary shift that changed the dynamics of the school, but resulted in the smoothest of blended cocktails that defined our class.
We grew out of the boombox era; early records (yes, LPs!) gave way to the horror of cassette tapes and Say Anything moments; and later, CDs. And now we make the leap to all-digital storage and playback, or persist in our luddite lapse. But we do persist, twenty years and counting, most all of us. And that in itself is worth all the pomp and circumstance tapes you can dredge up from the cutout bins.
I skipped out on the year five reunion, and one of the classmates I saw last night noted simply that "it sucked. The same cliques. Waste of time." Ten years was apparently a bit more of the same recipe, with a dash of the "what do you do what do you drive how large is your 401(k)". No stranger to the kitchen, I had feared as much and stayed away from both of these reunions like Willie Nelson from the IRS.
Well, twenty years has a way of making some of the world's atrocities not look so bad. High school went from mental canker sore to a mere throbbing reminiscence of chaotic conformity. What I realized yesterday, at the afternoon reunion picnic, and later at the formal reception (with standard shrimp and cheese) was that the people in high school were largely awesome, magnanimous, pimply, insecure screw-ups just like me! And now they were card-carrying adults and fantastic people. And no, not everyone worked for the government, or "in I.T". One of our classmates had not had a haircut since just before joining us senior year from another school. He literally sported dreads down to his rear end and a spirit and depth of soul as large and long as his coiffure. Others had participated in a diaspora to the corners of the contiguous states. What all had in common was a desire to genuinely know, "hey, how the hell are you?" and bother to wait for a response.
All imminence front and poseur had disappeared between years ten and twenty since our gleeful crossing of the stage to receive our rolled-up parchment passkey to life after six periods and a lunchbreak. My once proudest high school memory had been riding my bicycle from out in the sticks into town and to school on the last day of school. Now I was proudest simply to have been a part of such a great class; a class that absorbed me and many others in a county boundary shift that changed the dynamics of the school, but resulted in the smoothest of blended cocktails that defined our class.
We grew out of the boombox era; early records (yes, LPs!) gave way to the horror of cassette tapes and Say Anything moments; and later, CDs. And now we make the leap to all-digital storage and playback, or persist in our luddite lapse. But we do persist, twenty years and counting, most all of us. And that in itself is worth all the pomp and circumstance tapes you can dredge up from the cutout bins.
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