Class reunions: young and old, then and now

Recently, Marion at Create Joy and Wonder wrote about the anxieties involved in preparing to attend a high school reunion. Reading her words reminded me that I attended my (gasp) 50-year reunion in July and still haven't written about it.

This reunion has stayed on my mind longer than the previous three I've attended, and it has eluded easy description. I finally understand why.

Attending this reunion immersed me in a dual reality. For three days (including the four-hour drive each way), memories of high school came flooding back. Some were in sharp focus, some were hazy, but all were in living Technicolor. I recalled the faces of my classmates as they once were, youthful and unlined. And yet, the faces that now surrounded me were - like my own - older, creased, a bit saggy. I often found myself peering into those faces, seeking traces of the person I had known. Sometimes recognition came easily; other times the transformation was almost complete. This seemed especially true of the men; I easily recognized a small handful, but sometimes, looking around the room, I was tempted to wonder whether some of us had wandered into the wrong party.

I began to notice that I was carrying in my mind both faces, the "then" and "now" of each classmate I happened to speak with. With 350 graduating seniors and more than 200 at this reunion, my mind was a crowded place! 

Something else was crowding in as well. No matter the conversation, I always had a visual subtext: We are old. Yes, we might be smart, fun, enthusiastic, engaged in lots of interesting pursuits, but the faces kept reminding me, we are old. I shouldn't have been surprised. Most of us turned 68 this past year. But what we had come to celebrate was our youth. We surrounded ourselves with yearbook photos - classes, prom, band, the Sweet Shoppe, the junior class play. I could visualize those scenes; I knew how they played out, I could even feel the emotions - elation, disappointment, embarrassment, nervous excitement - that accompanied those days. It was amazing to be able to reach out and touch those times, and yet to have traveled so far from them.

The juxtaposition of then and now, young and old, has stayed in my head since that mid-July reunion. It reminds me that over the course of our lives, we are at once the same and different. The shy small-town girl is not so far from the surface. And if I deny that, if I think for example that I have become totally citified and sophisticated, then I am not being authentic. I've run into a few people like that at reunions over the years...people who have cultivated new manners of speaking and have seemed to consider themselves far more refined and cosmopolitan than the rest of us. Maybe they are, but I'd rather have it all - the cosmopolitan-ness and the roots in our working-class northern Minnesota town. In that sense, if we are lucky and wise, we are still young. 

I mentioned to my hair stylist that I was going to my reunion. She had recently attended one in her tiny hometown. I said I thought that people going to their first reunions sometimes worried about how they would be perceived. "For some people, it's all about job status and success," I said. "Oh," she said. "At ours, it's all about the dance-off."

That seems like a good approach. What really matters at reunions is the same thing that matters in life: what kind of person are you in the here-and-now? At each of my reunions, I talked with dozens of people. I hit it off with some, and not so much with others. Beginning way back at our ten-year reunion, some of the best conversations have been with people I didn't know well in school. It surprised me then; it doesn't any more. A couple of people I did know well have turned out to be not all that interesting. But any disappointment has been more than offset by the delightful conversations, some lengthy and others relatively brief, in which a wide variety of classmates and I have discovered the things that connect us through the years and across the miles.

P.S. If you have a reunion coming up, go to it. You'll have fun. The best way to prepare is to contact people you'd really like to see there and arrange to spend time together. My friend Cynthia recruited me and our friend Nancy, and I was delighted that she did. It meant a lot to reconnect, and it was too important to leave to chance.

P.P.S. During our reunion, the planning committee asked whether we wanted to come back in five years or ten. We all raised our hands for five. And we all made a joke that we knew wasn't really a joke: Who knows whether we'll still be around ten years from now? (And silently I added, Who even knows about five years from now?)

I'm planning to be at my next reunion, feeling both old and young.

Goodbye, summer...Hello, September

For me, no other month ends with as much finality as August. For one thing, June, July, and August are "the summer months." Even though summer officially extends another three weeks or so, it's not the same. Our long summer evenings, when it was light past 9 p.m., are gone. Temperatures are beginning to cool, or to transition to whatever craziness the next season brings. If garden tomatoes aren't ripe by now, they never will be. And of course school is back in session. Since I spent nearly my entire career working at colleges and universities, that sense of gearing up and getting serious every autumn is thoroughly incorporated into my biological rhythms. Actually, this serves me well, since our daycare with the grandkids corresponds to their parents' high school teaching schedules.

In fact, people around here began declaring "Summer's over" as soon as the State Fair opened a week ago. I steadfastly refuse to accept that line of thinking, just as I don't consider Christmas to be over on December 26. But somehow once the Fair started, I lost track of the days. When I looked at the calendar late this afternoon and realized that the date was August 31, it came as a bigger surprise than it should have. And when I opened the calendar to this month's firefighter photo, it was again oddly jarring to see, in capital letters: SEPTEMBER.  

It's not that I dislike September. I love fall colors, sunny days that morph into cool nights, and even the transformation of the garden as the perennials begin to lie down for their winter naps. Last year's autumn was spectacular, and I'm hoping this year will be the same. But to step from August into September is to leave something behind. Our week at the lake. Trips to the ballpark. Long summer evenings with late sunsets. And maybe something else: maybe the myth of carefree summer days when anything is possible.

This sense of loss seems complicated this year by a cluster of significant dates. August 31 was my Mom and Dad's anniversary. She died in 1980 just a week before what would have been their 40th anniversary. I often don't even remember the date of her death; but I always remember their anniversary, followed closely by Dad's birthday on September 4 and Mom's on September 7. Ever since Dad died in June, they've both been on my mind.

I'm choosing to believe that my reaction to the calendar is an artifact of that process, and that September is going to be a fabulous month. And oh yes, here is Mr. September from the St. Paul Firefighters Calendar, proceeds from which support two children's health charities.

Lovely distractions

Let's face it, since I retired I'm really not into goal-setting, scheduling, achieving, etc. Especially during the summer, which is my vacation from childcare for the grandkids. But Monday, they come back to begin a new season, and I am not ready.

I've had two months to finish painting my office. I still have two doors to do after the dreaded painting fiasco, and they're not going to get done by Monday. I have boxes of papers and knickknacks that I brought home from my workplace last December. And other boxes of papers and knickknacks that have been packed up since the painting project and need sorting. I do NOT want to just throw all this stuff back where it was; I want to sort and toss and recycle.

But I keep being distracted. One, I get drawn to the computer to read blogs. And two, there's this garden just outside my window. It calls to me in many ways.

It seems to be a banner year for phlox, and I have four different varieties all blooming their heads off. They are sending out a powerful scent, almost overwhelming. It makes me want to, I dunno, dance or daydream or gaze out at the flowers. Anything but paperwork.

Second, for the last couple of weeks I've been visited by butterflies, especially monarchs and tiger swallowtails and the little white ones whose name I never remember. With the window open I often hear their wings flap before I even see them. Then I am compelled to watch, and to pick up a camera and see whether I can capture some photos that top the ones I've already taken.

There also seems to be increased bird activity all around us. Goldfinches have been coming to the black-eyed susans that have volunteered themselves from the back yard into this pink-and-purple spot outside my window. Other finches follow, and I hear cardinals and other birds just out of sight. I'm forever pressing my face against the screen and craning my neck trying to spot the source of a tsk or a call. But they elude me, and my camera. Just as well. I have paperwork to do.

A rediscovered treasure

Our daughter Abby has been making greeting cards since she was a kid. Using colored markers, glitter, stickers, and more recently photos, she creates cheerful, heart-warming messages for birthdays and various holidays. I sometimes come across one that I used as a bookmark, but mostly they are with the cache of cards that I've been consolidating, little by little, in my office.

In 1996, when she was a sophomore in college, she used her card-making skills to create a Christmas gift. It's a display piece that features cut-out illustrations of some of my favorite activities: gardening, baseball, art (or does that one represent lounging?), theater, fishing, and Christmas. It, too, has been in my office, but like everything else it was packed away while the ceiling was being repaired. I just pulled it from the box moments ago.

I love that the photos still represent my interests, except of course for the grandkids. But then I read and rediscovered the poem. It was lovely at the time. It's even greater now.


The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe
by Joyce Johnson

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe,
And all her grandchildren played there too.

She laughed at their jokes (when they were funny)
And kept a green jar of bubblegum money.
She rode with them on the carousel
And played Monopoly very well.

She taught them to paint and how to bake bread.
She read them riddles and tucked them in bed.
She taught them to sing and how to climb trees.
She patched their jeans and bandaged their knees.

She remembered the way she'd felt as a child,
The dreams she'd had of lands that were wild,
Of mountains to climb, of villains to fight,
Of plays and poems she'd wanted to write.

She remembered all she'd wanted to do
Before she grew up and lived in a shoe.

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe
And lived in the dreams she'd had once too.
She told those she loved, "Children be bold.
Then you'll grow up but never grow old."

 And that is exactly the message I want to give to those I love.