Reuniting

There's nothing like a class reunion to focus one's attention on the passage of time. This weekend, my high school class held its 45th anniversary reunion, and I decided to attend the first of three events, the one with the smallest cover charge.

My high school years are largely memorable for a lot of heartache and pain. I skipped most of first grade, so for the remainder of my education in public school plus college, I was 6-12 months younger than nearly all my classmates. This wasn't terribly significant by the time I reached my sophomore year in college, but during grades 3 through 9, it was a major factor in my life since my maturity level always lagged behind that of most boys I knew at school. I was still interested in playing cowboys while they were moving on to organized youth baseball and girls. There were younger boys in my neighborhood that shared my interests, but eventually I outgrew them just as my classmates at school were outgrowing me. And so it was that by the time I reached high school, I was fairly isolated and had only one close friend. I was too young to drive and too shy to approach girls for dates. In short, I was too immature to live comfortably in the world I occupied.

There are things I remember about high school. I remember frequent struggles with algebra. I enjoyed trigonometry and could handle geometry, but high school algebra ate my lunch. The same was true at the collegiate level. Thank God my survival never depended on being able to apply principles of algebraic mathematics. I remember doing well in English, and developing the interest in writing now manifested in blogging. I remember P.E. classes and one incident in which a future Republican voter pissed on my leg in the shower. Literally.

One result of being younger than my classmates was that there was no shortage of older boys wanting to fight with me. Consequently, I spent recesses and lunch periods maintaining the lowest possible profile until I could return to the relatively safe classroom environment.

By the time I was old enough to be interested in girls, I'd experienced enough rejection to understand how to avoid it. Rather than ask for dates I'd simply worship certain girls from a distance, and at home, lie on my bed deep in romantic fantasies. I'd memorize lyrics to sad ballads I heard on the radio, like "Blue On Blue" by Bobby Vinton, because they captured my mood so effectively. In junior high I developed a temporary crush on a girl because during a class in square dancing, I was her partner and was dazzled by how soft and warm she was. Any girl who smiled at me or spoke a kind word became the object of a brief crush which could be prolonged by another smile or kind word.

The condensed version -- heartache and pain, heartache and pain. The greatest revelation of my freshman year in college was that the real world was nothing like high school. Compared with high school, the upperclassmen in my outfit at TAMU were grown men, some with wives and children. As adolescence ended, I discovered I was playing on an even field with my classmates. It was as if a bright light came on, and I began to consider my high school years, in retrospect, as a period of pointless suffering.

I didn't attend a high school reunion until the 25th, and then only because I was urged into it by the guy who'd been my best friend from grades 7 through 12 (mentioned earlier). I hadn't known many people in high school and had no particular use for some I did know, but thought it might be cool to see how girls I'd adored then looked now, in their early forties.

As it turned out, I surprised myself by enjoying the reunion. I talked to several classmates whose experiences with insecurity and fear of rejection weren't too different from mine. I realized that what I'd considered my unique despair was probably something most teenagers go through in some form or other. I had conversations with some of the women I had adored in the 1960s, which provided an opportunity to confess my crushes. Oh, to have had the self-confidence then that I had now...

For various reasons, I missed most of the reunions following the 25th, and another twenty years flew by. The woman who'd been student body secretary our senior year called me to see if I had any updated information about classmates, and persuaded me to join at least one of the events at the upcoming 45th. A few days ago, she e-mailed a newsletter listing the names of classmates who promised to attend, and I prepared by pulling out my wife's 1964 yearbook (her sophomore year, my senior) and matching names in the letter with yearbook photographs.

Friday night arrived, and I saw people I hadn't seen since 1989, or 1964 in several cases. Some had held up under the burden of years better than others, but everyone looked like someone who could be some youngster's grandparent. Many probably were. My first conversation of the evening was with a man who had spent some of his time in the 1960s arranging lunch hour fights for me with other boys who weren't part of the in-crowd. Eventually I found a quiet spot from which I could observe the comings and goings. I saw a few of my crushes, now in their 60s, and killed time wondering how life might've worked out if I'd mustered the courage to ask them for dates. I'll never know.