A few thoughts about my 30th high school class reunion.
When my children were a bit younger, they were obsessed with Harry Potter. For several months after they received the first volume as a gift, we would curl up on their beds and I would read a chapter or two just before lights out. Hogwarts seemed perfect to them. Yes, there was all the typical social infighting and gossip that made school difficult to navigate. (Every classroom seems to have a Draco Malfoy lurking and plotting off in one corner, or a Hermione Granger showing off about how quick and clever she is.) But, who wouldn’t prefer a classroom where the lessons aren’t boring, where instead of math and spelling you studied potions and spells? And, Hogwarts seemed to address perfectly any criticisms about the impracticality of grade school education: Of course, young wizards needed to know charms and incantations. Outlining sentences or knowing what a gerund is turned out to be a tougher sale.
I liked “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” as much as they did, for all its fantasy and adventure, but I fell in love with it toward the end of the book. Harry and his friends embark on a set of challenges that lead them toward a special stone hidden somewhere inside Hogwarts, hoping they can use it to extract an elixir of life. They happen upon the Mirror of Erised. The mirror’s magic, they learn eventually from Dumbledore, comes from reflecting back not the physical presence posed before it, but the deepest yearnings of that person’s heart. Erised, we learn, is the word “desire” written backwards. To my children, this revelation brought wide-eyed delight. It was a puzzle piece that helped solved the riddle. For me, the passage hinted that these were more than mere children’s tales. This duality— the chasm that exists between who we are and the longings and hungers that motivate us— as much as anything, captured the human condition. The recognition of that same duality captured an essence of what it means to be adult.
I thought of J.K. Rowling’s magic mirror last Saturday. That evening, the end of a humid late July day typical of the ones I remember growing up, the Portsmouth West Class of 1980 met for our 30th year reunion. Though there were reunions to mark the passing of the 10th and 20th mileposts, this was the first one I attended. Having gone first to college, then New York and London and, finally, New York again, my contact with my classmates is erratic. I had not seen most of them since the May night of our graduation, the few I stay in touch with I see infrequently at best. Ron, who played trombone in stage band, mentioned that he saw me driving on a highway once, but couldn’t get my attention; at least another twenty-five years passed before this chance to share a meal.
We met in the banquet hall of the local American Legion, which the night before a small, generous committee transformed into a more festive version of itself. Tammy and Scott, classmates who married 20 years after high school, still live in town and did most of the organizing, but others helped out— Diane and Mary live in Portsmouth, Myria, Marsha and Greg came in from out of town. There were twinkly strands of white lights strung overhead and around posts and banisters, offset with balloons in Portsmouth West’s black and orange. The tables were dressed in pompoms and tiny cheerleading megaphones. The placemats were laminated reproductions of our class photo— a composite of our individual yearbook photos. It served as a directory when confronted by someone at another table you no longer recognized. To aid us on that score, the committee created nametags that included a copy of our senior picture, which helped but didn’t always do the trick. Craig, whose dad managed my first minor league baseball team, looked almost no different than I remembered him. I started kindergarten with Arnold at Dry Run School. It seemed strange to see him with greying hair and a shaggy beard.
While my teenage children have “High School Musical” or “Glee” to caricature the teenage years and high school, movies like “The Big Chill” frame for me what a reunion might be like. To see it as projected on screen, both are events punctuated with rivalries and love stories, earnest exchanges in hidden corners, all playing out against a singable soundtrack, where modulations into minor keys are momentary and invariably resolve in a power chord. Now, here we were— or, at the very least, a representative cross-section of us— thrown together after years apart, trying to pick up the conversation like we had paused to take a breath mid-sentence, uncertain about whether what we were saying now still made sense given where we were before.
I’ve heard people sometimes say how they would love to have their high school years back again, but I can honestly say I wouldn’t. Don’t get me wrong: It was a great time with Friday night football and pizza or school dances afterwards, class plays and cast parties, band trips and basketball, Senior Skip Day. I remember a night out at the movies with Bill, John and Jody to see “Monty Python’s The Life of Brian,” complete with a recap in faux British accents as we sat in the drive thru at Rax Roast Beef. Saturday night, as Bob wandered between tables, he overheard someone recounting a prank he pulled involving snapping the straps on someone’s bra.
But, high school years have awkwardness and confusion, a sense of uncertainty that seeps into t-shirts and blue jeans like the smell of sweat or cigarettes. Who is in and out? How do you summon the courage to ask for a prom date? Who can you ask without risking public humiliation? How do you touch each other when it comes time to dance? Of course not a bit of that frailty can be admitted to anyone. It is all dressed up with a bit of swagger and nonchalance meant to disguise your insecurities to others, perhaps intended by dint of constant repetition to convince yourself you are okay after all. Duane reminded me that I told him I thought Ohio State, where I went off to college, was “boring.” I flushed with embarrassment, not because I recalled the conversation but because there was a time when I was arrogant enough to say such a thing.
No, I would not want to go back there, although doing so would at least allow me to forget how much time has passed. But as a parent now, I wish I could share a word with John at 18 to ease his future path— about how some things that seem so important turn out not to matter, how decisions we make in a moment are like stones thrown into still waters, setting off ripples that echo over time. That despite our angst and planning, it is the unexpected twist that tends to occupy us, that how we manage the crossroads of unpredictability defines us more than any road map ever could. But, such imaginings are a lost cause, and when I substitute my three teenage children as the audience, I’m no more successful than my parents were with me.
A reunion is a bit like listening to songs you know from years ago: Even the ones you didn’t especially take to are more comfortable to sit with now, though you can’t remember all the words. Familiarity matters more; the music triggers memory and becomes a shorthand way to summon a place and time. Not that time alone covers over everything: My observation was that people still sat in threes or fours with the people they hung out with. The smokers still positioned themselves closest to the door. But around the bar or after dinner, talking to others was much easier. They weren’t rivals or crushes or jocks now. There were careers, children and grandchildren to talk about, the places they had traveled to or lived. Rich moved to Texas just after graduation with a handful of others from West, he reminded me, worked and retired from Budweiser and has a pawn shop up the river in Barboursville. Pam lives now in Ashland and has a daughter at university where my Chelsea goes. Ed, who I stood next to during boys’ ensemble, is a preacher whose ministry has taken him to Honduras and Costa Rica. Carolyn is a nurse practitioner serving Scioto County; her son just graduated from high school and aspires to be drum major at Ohio State.
The organizers put together some prizes in categories like who travelled the farthest, who looked the same or had changed the most. Sue, who tied in the “most children” category, joked that if she had only known she would have had one more. I spent a bit of the evening talking to Barbara, Bob’s wife; it was interesting to hear from a spouse’s perspective what had filtered through about our high school years. And, because not everyone could make this evening, there was a chance to hear about some others that classmates were in touch with. Sherry, who moved back to Portsmouth fairly recently, said hi to a couple of us from Chris.
I’ve heard my siblings say, after they’ve gone to their class reunions, that most attendees come from out of town. That wasn’t my experience. There was a nice mix of locals and people who came in just for the occasion. I’ve only spent three summers in Portsmouth since I graduated, and I admit it can hard to come back when I visit my parents, even for a day or two. The day before, Dad and I spent two or three hours driving around and it was sad to see so many familiar shop fronts and factories gone. Wolfe’s, a popular men’s clothing shop, is now a Goodwill bookstore, and Portsmouth Paint, where Dad worked for forty years was transformed into a hair salon. Like many Midwestern towns, the landscape is littered with franchise fast food restaurants and strip malls, and Walmart seems as much as anywhere to be the popular meeting place. But, there are positive signs, too: the college has gone from one building to a substantial campus, with a state of the art auditorium. The high school is in a different location, and a new middle school building is about to open in the fall. Tammi’s teenage daughters take part in Cirque d’Art, a performing arts group that focuses on gymnastics and acrobatics. Nothing like that existed thirty years ago.
Derailed, a local band that includes Gary’s son, kindly offered to perform for free. They turned out a double album’s worth of covers: the Eagles and Allmans, a bit of Lynard Skynard and Aerosmith, all intended to put us in a late 1970’s mindset, to transport us back to evenings when we blared music with the windows down as we drove across the Towpath or parked along the river bank imagining what our lives might turn out like. But good as they were— and they were rocking— the real entertainment was seeing and talking to others. Too abruptly it came to an end. Too quickly, the sands shifted through the hourglass; it was as if, having formulated a bit of alchemy that allowed our class magically to reassemble, the chemical compound proved too unstable to hold at equilibrium for long. The band packed up their gear, while Marsha passed an upended megaphone for a collection. Tammy and Scott popped the balloons, others gathered up the table of yearbooks and the cards of pictures commemorating the seven classmates who have died. A few of us went down the street to a bar for a drink just after, but that lasted only about another hour, and soon enough I was headed back to Mom and Dads. I creeped up the drive, dimming the headlights, not wanting to wake them, like I was coming in past curfew.
The next morning I was off to church, then a family reunion, both of which in their own way were a continuation of the exercise in checking boxes and filling in the blanks. By seven o’clock that evening I was tired, but it was time to begin the drive back to New York. After two days of solid conversation and reminiscing, I was suddenly, mercifully, alone. A dozen hours of road lay in front of me, and I was looking forward to seeing my kids again, who spent the week with their mom. Much of Sunday evening’s stretch of highway was through West Virginia mountains, the hillsides like leafy green blankets, smooth and unspoiled, threaded only by highways that skim along ridges or weave through narrow valley passes. At times, when I could let my mind wander, it wasn’t difficult to imagine that I was traveling through land never seen before.
I needed time to think, to try to find perspective. Three or four hours before the class reunion, Marsha emailed me: Mrs Pfleger, a teacher meant to be the guest speaker, had a family emergency and now could not attend. Would you mind speaking, she asked, since you were the class president? I was honored to be sure, but am an uncomfortable public speaker, someone who feels safer writing down the words. So, I sat at my parents’ kitchen table for an hour and took some notes that tried to sum up thirty missing years. I settled on the image of a mirror. I thought about how, when I look in the mirror now, I often still see myself as a teenager—confident, excited, with everything to come. But then, one of my kids calls to me wanting something, or I think of a bill I need to pay. Suddenly, the grey hair and wrinkles are there, reminders of the time passed and the life lived. A reunion, I guessed, is a special chance to see both images at once: to reflect on some of what happened to us over the three decades since we left school, in a room of friends with whom we share memories from all those years ago. Now, a day later, I could only think of other things I wished I’d said, little turns of phrase in my nervousness I overlooked. I agonized like I was back in high school, insecure about whether I measured up.
Though I had some CDs with me, I was in the mood for radio. The only stations I could find kept fading in and out as the road twisted, so I kept scanning to find a channel not lost in static fog. This being the Bible belt, there was a bit of gospel music and preaching, and being West Virginia, there was country too. But I tended in the main toward classic rock. It was comfortable, familiar, and since I was by myself I could even sing along. I think it was somewhere near Morgantown that my scanning dial landed on the opening bars of a song I immediately recognized but had not thought of in at least twenty years. It was Styx. Not the “Renegade” that I remember Les and Eddie singing as we changed classes in the chorus room or “Babe,” the sentimental ballad we slow-danced to at the junior prom. Instead, it was “Come Sail Away.” Left to my own devices, I would have chosen another song to sum up the reunion. Something cooler, more sophisticated— a song with razor fine lyric by Bruce Springsteen or Ryan Adams, sung with the jagged melancholy edge of Tom Petty’s or Lucinda Williams’s voice. But sometimes you take your soundtracks as you find them, and because I couldn’t quite remember the words, I found myself listening. About setting out over uncharted waters. About reflections in the mirror of stormy waves that spark memories of the past and of childhood friends. About knowing some desires remain unrealized and some hopes remain unfulfilled. About choosing to carry on.
