The 55th anniversary reunion of my high school class did not begin well for me.
I've always had mixed feelings about class reunions. At our 10th, several of us demonstrated our grown-up status by drinking one another under the table. Reports of my behavior at the 10th kept me away from our 20th, by all accounts a more subdued affair. Our 30th was downright quiet, made livelier by a couple of grandchildren, the consequences of a teenage marriage that had endured against all expectations. I talked with a woman I'd had a crush on in eighth grade and whom I recognized only by her name tag; she'd gained a great deal of weight and had several related health problems, and though she was cheerful and optimistic during our talk, I later heard that she died a few weeks after the reunion.
I skipped the 40th. I learned through our faithful class correspondent that my good friend and fellow sci-fi geek had died of complications of depression, i.e. suicide. By this time, enough of our classmates had passed on that we thought it wise to hold reunions every five years. At our 45th, a classmate who had become a casino singer sang of lost lovers and lost children, his body showing the effects of alcohol and cigarettes and late hours, he who in high school had been built like a lumberjack, our bad boy with a heart of gold. A sad-faced woman who had struggled to make a career for herself out of the area's meager resources now spoke to me, to everyone, through her husband: tell Michael about this, she would say; tell Michael about that.
In the course of every reunion visit, even the 10th, I saw signs of further decline in the town I had grown up in, empty storefronts and vacant lots and sagging, unpainted houses. The women's and men's clothing stores, the appliance store, the hardware stores, the small businesses that had made the town a midcentury shopping destination, could not compete with the larger stores in the Wal-Mart town 20 miles to the south, and one by one they closed. School consolidations took first the junior high school and then the grade school — the high school remains in town for the time being. There are fewer than half of the students in the district than there were the year of my graduation.
It was with this sense of decline that I greeted my classmates as they arrived for the lunchtime gathering of our 55th anniversary reunion. Though I knew they would be changed, my memories of their grade school and high school faces were so clear in my mind that these weathered, wrinkled, sagging versions, these canes and walkers and wheelchairs, couldn't have shocked me more if they'd been a total surprise.
Our class's star athlete, the guy who dated the prettiest girls, now was overweight and ponderous, talking at length about his prostate surgery and incontinence. I didn't recognize the woman who had been the most attractive girl in our class, disliked by many of the other girls because of the attention she received from boys, until she mentioned her late husband, the glamorous guy who'd won her hand, dead of Alzheimer's disease these five years.
Our class clown, the life of previous reunions, had been made a paraplegic by a workplace accident. His wife had recently died, and he had come back, perhaps out of loneliness, from a faraway and handicapped-friendly environment to his small hometown where he would have a hard time just getting through the day.
One by one, these weathered, wrinkled, ravaged faces morphed into some semblance of the young faces I remembered. And I saw in several of those faces the same kind of bewilderment and surprise as they talked to this white-bearded guy who looks, to those who can't see beyond the beard, 10 years older than he is. Can this really be the boyish, oddly-talented guy who wrote the senior skit that brought down the house?