The Reunion

You might think about the reunion fifty years after your high school graduation at the time you graduate, but you don't really think that it will ever happen. At seventeen, I couldn't imagine sixty-seven. That would make me almost the same age as my grandmother! Unthinkable. And yet, somehow, the day arrives.

Two years ago, the class of '65 invited all the sixties classes from our school, Woodlawn, in Baltimore County, just west of Baltimore City, to join them in their reunion. I was planning to go to that. Our school only opened in 1961, with no seniors that year, so 1963 was the first graduating class, and I knew people from the classes from '63 to '69. I sent in my money, but a visit to the cardiologist a week before confirmed that I needed work done, and I was hospitalized Tuesday before the weekend, and three new stents were placed in my arteries. I had to admit I could not drive 200 miles over the weekend to a reunion. This year, my fall cardiologist visit is after the reunion, this week, and I'm hoping I will be okay.

I asked a few people I know if they were planning to attend, but they were not. One of my very best friends from those years died in 2012. Another friend, who left our school after eleventh grade, wouldn't spend a hundred dollars to attend.

I was nervous about going. Joe and I drove to my sister's house, twenty miles from the venue, where we stayed Friday and Saturday night. He had agreed to do a wedding for the daughter of a high school era friend (different school, different year) in downtown Washington.

I had directions to the venue, a hotel in Columbia, Maryland, where many of my classmates live now, in the next county west of Baltimore County. Columbia, a private development, didn't exist until our senior year. I used to go by there on Saturday nights with a daredevil friend at 100 miles per hour on empty two-lane U.S. 29, which is now a six-lane expressway jammed with traffic, on the way to visit friends in Silver Spring. I dressed for the reunion in my dress-up hipster clothes and had lost a few pounds, but still, I didn't look anything like my high school picture. I didn't know if people would speak to me at all.

I need not have worried. People were friendly. I pretended to remember people I didn't. I was greeted at the door by two women who grew up a few blocks from me and were in my class in first grade. A woman from the 'hood reminded me that she had graduated from Johns Hopkins with me, after transferring in junior year, the first year Hopkins had women undergraduates.

I sat with the former student council president, who had been kicked out of Yale freshman year after a raucous demonstration, had lived in West Virginia, become a leftist activist, then a Christian and now a religious Jew again. He is still dedicated to social justice issues. He thought we were on a similar path, and I imagine we are.

Everyone was upbeat, and did not discuss politics. We were there to catch up, to get a look at our old friends and compare and contrast. People tended to gloss over the sadness in their lives, but if you dug into them, you could find illness, the loss of a spouse or child, divorce, the fear of being alone in old age, the feeling that we may have lost our looks or passed up chances that would have improved our lives. My heart went out to everyone, happy or pretending.

There was a little book, where we had sent in about our current marriages, children and grandchildren. Most of us were retired and spending our time traveling. There were several marriages in our class, or with students in other years. Some were married very young (two in or just after eleventh grade) two marriages were between Jews and Christians, not at all common then, but still married. People asked me how I came to live in West Virginia after twenty-five years in Los Angeles, and I told them I was married to a rabbi, a man, and he was hired by a congregation in Morgantown. Most people knew that Morgantown is the home of West Virginia University. A few smiles froze and eyes glazed over on hearing this, but not many. And I have become friends with some classmates on Facebook, so they knew about it. The only other openly gay man in the class, I found out from reading our little book and doing some research, died two years ago. I knew he had AIDS, but he may still have died from something else.

People were surprised that I not only remembered them, but what street they lived on, and one (still) pretty girl told me I was the cutest boy in our class. I felt like I was on a playground from my childhood, and many of my friends were there, all trying to look like their grandparents. I still think of us all as the teenagers we were then, despite everything we have been through.

I enjoyed myself, and I was friendly to everyone, even people I could have held a long-time grudge against, and I felt like that favor was returned. We are all turning sixty-eight this year, and chances are we won't make it to a sixtieth reunion.

Despite our differences, we all shared a common experience many years ago. There was an understanding of how things were then, and we all knew each other when we were somewhat less guarded. We had to be honest with each other; we all came from the same place.

I'm glad I went to this reunion. I feel more grounded having seen how things turned out for everyone, including being able to see how things turned out for myself. I'm grateful to still be alive, and for my life to have turned out surprising, and surprisingly good.

With friends from the neighborhood: top, L. to R: David, Jimmy, Ann and me, bottom, L to r. Nancy and Harriett

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I won Russ Margo's CD as a raffle prize. Here he is with me after autographing it. It's good!

With Lenny, my friend since 7th grade, and his wife, Shelley

With Connie (still married to classmate Darryl) in her mascot uniform for the Woodlawn Warriors