In August of 2013, I attended the forty-year reunion of my high school class. Previously, I’d attended only the ten-year event. I’m not sure how many I’ve missed, but I became increasingly — for want of a better phrase — militantly ambivalent about the whole idea. High school wasn’t a particularly wonderful time for me. But in all honesty, neither was it a traumatic experience. Certainly, there were a few moments along the way which confused me and even made me question my value as a human being — which is probably more common than a lot of people would like to admit — but I have always tended to let things roll off my back; I figured things would eventually work out one way or the other.
As I recall, the invitation for the twenty-year reunion came with a short questionnaire to return with the RSVP, and a few blank lines were provided at the bottom of the page to give our thoughts on our high school years. I can’t recall exactly what I wrote at the time, but it wasn’t all that pretty. Which isn’t to say that it was nasty or anything like that, but I recall wanting more space in which to write. I’m quite sure I’d reflected on the rather silly nature of making a big deal about getting together with a bunch of people with whom I’d spent but four years of my life — many of whom I hadn’t gotten to know all that well (or, in a few cases, didn’t care to know); many of whom didn’t know, like or care to know me. My cynical self tends to sniff out phoniness and avoid it, and as the reunion would no doubt gloss over most — if not all — of the worst parts of my and everyone else’s high school experiences, I leaned towards not going, while still leaving open a slight window crack of possibility should certain stars align. It was, after all, only a two-hour drive away.
Ultimately, I didn’t attend. The decision was helped by the fact that my then-wife and I owned but one car. I suppose, though, that had I been compelled to attend, I would have rented one. At the time, I had become re-acquainted with one of my fellow classmates, Joe Durst, whom I’d discovered lived near me and worked as a physical therapist (he was even mine, briefly, when I’d injured my back), and I called to see if he might be going. No, he said. So, I didn’t give it much further thought.
Not long after I’d mailed in my response that year, I got a letter from a fellow classmate, Marcia Schwind, who was on the organizing committee. She recounted how her high school days, too, were far from wonderful — something that took me completely by surprise — and that her life away from school hadn’t really been all that much better. Marcia, you see, had transferred to our Catholic school from a nearby public school. She was fabulously good looking from head to toe, was a great dresser and had dimples that all the money in the world couldn’t buy. For someone like me, a cynical wannabe hippie anti-establishment type, she was way out of my league. So reading her words was a bit of a shock. Her letter revealed, of course, that we don’t always know the people we think we know; that reading a book by its cover remains a near-impossible task. Also, she complimented me on having “brass balls” in high school.
I tried reaching out to her a few years later, but the phone number she’d given to me was no longer in service.
Twenty more years passed, and for the forty-year reunion, curiosity got the best of me, I suppose. Facebook had already brought quite a few members of our class together virtually, and while I don’t know if I would say that there was a build-up of excitement for the event for me, I was looking forward to it. There were people I wanted to see again; there were moments from forty years ago that I wondered if others had remembered. So, I sent in my RSVP and my $25 check and I agreed to produce the photo name tags.
The night before the official reunion event, Party In The Parking Lot was held at the high school. It’s basically a cookout that had been held annually for quite some time (I recently learned it’s been discontinued), and open to alumni from all classes. A few from my class were there, but I spent most of my time talking with Kathleen Kundrath, Peggy Carlo and Rick Palombi, all of whom I’d not seen since graduation day or, possibly, our ten-year reunion. My memories of that event are fuzzy, except for the mess-up in the printing of the program in which classmates were paired up with each other based on their names. The program was supposed to have read: “If Pat Power married Denise Drill, she would be Denise Power Drill” or something like that. I can’t recall what the foul-up was, but it had to do with a cut-and-paste error, so the punchline didn’t make one whit of sense.
But I digress…
The next afternoon, when I arrived at the home of Andy and Kay (Hurst, who graduated with my older brother in 1970) Lodzinski, Andy and Ted Hill were pounding a “Welcome Class of 1973” sign into the ground in front of the house. Before I’d even pulled up even with them on the road, Andy had recognized me and greeted me. That he recognized me right away surprised me. (Perhaps it was only because he knew I’d be arriving fairly early with the name tags?) We laughed about the party a few houses up the road that surely would confuse a few people looking for ours since balloons also announced that event, then I parked the car and made my way to the garage, where snacks were being put out. I started setting up my laptop, hoping to be able to upload photos in close to real time to Facebook and possibly set up a Skype transmission, but Andy and Kay’s wireless signal didn’t reach that far, so, I gave up on the idea.
Ted and I reacquainted ourselves, talking kids and marriages and divorces (I’d forgotten that he and fellow classmate Jane Schlageter had once been married), and I eventually got around to telling him that I wanted to photograph his car, a Chrysler Crossfire. I love photographing cool and/or classic cars using an insanely complicated panorama technique, and with all of the wide-open space of Andy and Kay’s property, it seemed like a great chance to photograph it, so, we headed over to the parking area and he moved it to a more photogenic spot near some old barns. Upon returning to the garage, I quickly stitched the images together for him to take a look at.
Steadily, people arrived. Those who hadn’t changed a lot in their general appearances (Margy Reinbolt, Mary Hoffman, Ted, Andy) were easy to recognize sans name tag, but others, such as Cathy Geisel and Robbie Juhasz — who now had short hair and wore glasses — didn’t click with me immediately, even though I’d bumped in to Robbie once or twice since graduation day. I admit that I had trouble with a couple faces, but by and large, most of the people hadn’t changed all that significantly in appearance, although I was surprised to see that Scott Stachowicz had gotten… tall!
I took it upon myself to be the evening’s documentarian, so, I didn’t engage in as many conversations as perhaps everyone else did or as many as I’d like to have. I took pictures of almost everyone as they talked, stopping occasionally to chat here and there. There were a lot of sports reminiscences. Margy’s husband (also named Andy) had attended rival St. Francis High School, so, a light-hearted argument ensued over whether the clock should have been stopped when wide receiver (we called them Ends back then) Bob Gladieux rolled out of bounds in a key play of the Stritch victory, stopping the clock with but a few seconds left with which to kick the winning field goal, which brought with it a City League Blue Division crown and a trip to the Shoe Bowl City Championship game. Ted gleefully rubbed it in with “Get over it!” taunts. For years, Stritch had been a doormat for many of the larger City League teams, so, it was nice (both then and all these years later) to own the boasting rights for a change. Of course, as a non-football player, my involvement was vicarious.
After dinner, and as dusk was rolling in, everyone (but one, as best as I can tell) assembled for a group photograph. I wanted to do something less block-like, but in what seemed to be an organic development, everybody assembled in basically two levels along the edge of the pool’s deck. I did my best to ensure that everyone’s face was see-able before handing my camera over to Frank Hymore’s wife, Connie, but I didn’t account for the fact that she was a little shorter than I, or that others were taking photos at the same time — faces were looking in different directions at various times. Bob Gladieux and Patricia Mominee were the only two whose faces were partially hidden, but I wish I’d taken more control. I also wish I’d brought a tripod.
After the group photo, we headed to the baseball diamond (yes, Andy and Kay have a baseball diamond on their property) to honour those classmates who had died: Michael Coughlin, Warren Stacey, Mary Rettenberger, Willie White, Jim Farr, Chris Hickman, Mike Ello, and Pam Graver. It was a moving tribute… heart-shaped mini-hot-air balloons (for want of a better word) were set adrift from home plate. The first (Jim Farr’s, I believe) had trouble getting airborne, and eventually got snagged by branches in not-too-distant trees. The rest took flight westwardly in the slight, steady breeze and fading sunlight, as a gibbous moon made its ascent in the southeast sky.
When it was over, we made our way back to the house, the garage, the tent, the fire pit. Lacking a high-definition video camera, I went about recording a cellphone video of everyone I could find, in which I asked them to recite their names. In retrospect, I would have preferred to do something a bit more elaborate, perhaps asking where they lived now or asking each person a random-ish question, but I didn’t want to ask too much of them, considering this was the first time many had seen me in thirty years.
As darkness fell, I put away the camera and the phone and settled in for a little conversation around the fire pit. As someone remarked on Facebook in the following days, it was as if we had picked up where we’d left off forty years ago. Many of us had seen little or nothing of each other in the years following our graduation, yet it seemed pretty easy to be in each other’s company. Before the night was over, I was fortunate to have had a couple of substantive conversations, which pleased me and sort of surprised me.
Something I think about a lot — probably too much — is how much significance we — as a society — put on those four years of our lives. I alluded to a few traumatic moments I endured, but surely others have had worse experiences. I was a pretty average kid — I wasn’t a highly achieving student (GPA-wise, I was in the bottom twenty-fifth of my class of about a hundred and eighty), I wasn’t a star athlete, I wasn’t a hunk. I know my smart-alecky contrariness often jumped up to bite me on the ass, but I don’t think I quite qualified as a jerk... probably just an annoyance.
As I consider the overall experience, however, I sort of do get why high school days mean so much to so many as it’s a time in which we begin to recognize certain things within/about ourselves; it’s a time of quasi-independence from our parents; it’s a time in which we begin to develop our social skills; develop our interests — poetry, art, music, politics; for many, it’s a time of yearning — wanting to find love (I’m pretty sure that I had at least twice as many crushes than I have fingers and toes). We meet people from a wider geographic pool than our grade school neighbourhoods and want to be adults with them. I suppose that reunions — at long last — give us that opportunity.
