Class of '69 - October 2009

The prospect of our 40th high school reunion – we were excited. We had decided, to hell with the busiest and most stressful part of our working year, just drop everything, get the airline ticket and just go.

Another old friend, the one without internet, the snail mail one, said, oh, you are so brave. I just don’t think I could face it. Where we felt anticipation, she felt mild curiosity. Our best friend here at home, eight years our junior, said, I can’t imagine wanting to see anyone I went to high school with. Maybe because I changed schools a lot. I don’t know…

We wondered, so why were we so game? To be honest, the excitement had first been worked up by that phenomenon known as Facebook. The faces had been coming up out of the mist, like the triangular pieces of wisdom offered by the Magic 8 ball – each one teasingly obscured by 40 years of life having been lived but left untold. We were starting to connect, remember – and even to repair.

With us, the desire had long been there, before Facebook. We had already been trawling the web in hopes of a reunion. We hadn’t really even twigged on the even forty-year date – we had just known it was time. And then nervously discovering that there had already been a ten years’ reunion, and then a twenty – and no one had dug us up to invite us, even though our mom still lived in the house we’d grown up in. But still we persisted, still we wanted, we had to be there.

On the very eve, there were some fleeting doubts. Our mom and sis helped fuss over what to wear – 87-year-old mom so effortlessly picking up the roles she’d played when we were 17 – (tuck in the blouse or wear it out?) all of us knowing that there wasn’t much to be done, things were as they were, and perhaps that game was even then starting to reveal its false machinations. The weekend was in fact, to put an end to all that - to show how none of that mattered anymore, and how none of it ever had.

The festive night, the inviting lights, The friend that approached, his characteristic laugh unmistakeable, simply extending his hands, looking at us, shaking his head, wordless: I’m here. So many people and places to visit in those rooms, and so many we did not even make it around to. A strange spell came over us making all the women beautiful and all the men deadly cute. We kid you not.

Later, in the car with our first love from junior high, and indeed our first date (he reminded us that his dad had driven), we heard him say he was so glad he came, he described it all as somewhat of a triumph, just that we’re still here, I mean, we obviously all knew enough to stop at red lights and such, but then, The twentieth would have been hard for me. I don’t think I could have done the twentieth. Why? There was just too much left to do. But now…

Is there now nothing left to do? Certainly not – we are not suggesting a slide towards death. We feel rather that we are just hitting some kind of stride. The night, the lights, the going out, all seemed a pocket of forever, as hopeful as any prom party or graduation dinner. Life goes on and life is, after all, so good. And that night, the best thing of all, was how a kind of peace had settled in. A feeling so unexpected, and overwhelming and strange – quite simply, we felt like we had made it home. We had made it home safe.