Our resident baby boomer recently went through a terrifying rite ofpassage called the high school reunion and though there was a story there. Originally we had assigned the piece to a well-known psychologist, hoping we would help shed some light on the intensity of feeling that reunions arouse. In the end the article didn't make any sense to us--or to the psychologist either. Put another way, there didn't seem to be a generalized experience or governing insight that he could devine.
That doesn't mean we're not interested. Instead, we feel there are just a lot of experiences that are absorbing to us in the aggregate sense. So what follows is a semi-representation--male and female, ages 23 to 65. So what do you think, is high school destiny?
--The editors
#1
A HIGH SCHOOL reunion? What on earth did I want to go back for? Was I even conscious in high school? I'd had outrageously good times and many friends, but none I was interested in seeing over the intervening three decades. My life certainly didn't peak in high school; in fact it went in unforeseen ways, and I didn't want to have to spend my time explaining myself to anyone.
Yet this was to be different. Not a flag-flying Event but a private gathering of, well, "our crowd"--perhaps a hundred or so from a large suburban high school.
The plans grew cozily--a name I hadn't thought of in 30 years would crop up and generate a smile, a memory, a "what the hell is he doing these days." Surprisingly, I was catching reunion fever.
The females--I still can't call us women and we're definitely not girls--were a different matter entirely. Most had disappeared into marriage, maternity, and the 'burbs soon after college (our heads had been molded in the '5Os). But from time to time I'd heard that one or another was divorced, even working, a fate unimaginable to a crop of retired secretaries. A few were reportedly even doing something interesting--an author, a professor.
One by one, the past reconnected, first at a cocktail party the night before. With few exceptions, a rather astonishing crowd. Many were doing amazing things, none more amazing than the dancer with a heart-lung transplant who far into the night mesmerized us all with tales about the donor she never met but truly knew, and whose family she had helped heal. It was an evening like that. No one compared real estate or kids; we went right to the heart. After the whoops of recognition, it turned out we had known one another all along, had always seen in each other the exciting selves that were struggling to be born in those strangely conformist times.
There was only one off-note to the whole evening. A big-time producer--divorced, remarried, profiled in Vogue, who was feeling disconnected from her past and had inadvertently caused the reunion--arrived, attended by a phalanx of four. While the entire crowd was remarkably well-preserved, The Producer was something else. A show-stopping sliver of off-the-shoulder black Lycra (unmistakably designer of the nanosecond) upstaged her ultra-thin frame. The sturdy blond hair was now a pre-Raphaelite cascade (the kinky kind we hated back then), and the straight-on nose had become a demure rise on an updated face. The conversation dipped lightly, I recall, as this apparition appeared, but resumed quickly. She was gone in no time, carried away by shyness, it was said, under her canopy of friends. You couldn't tear the rest of us away.
The next afternoon was It. A giant lawn party on a blazingly hot June day. It started as we parked the car--an ex-beau I hadn't seen since just after college pulled up at the same time. We hugged hard. "I feel like I know you," his wife said graciously. "He talks about you all the time." It was an afternoon like that. Epiphanies of how deeply we had affected one another.
But, man for man, it was the women who had come the farthest. "Tell me your story and I'll tell you mine," the hostess said, pulling me into the shade for the short-order whole-life update. More than 15 years after graduation, she was living the life we had all dreamed of in high school: the husband, the kids, the house. The security. But she had fallen into a deep malaise. It was her husband who had finally suggested she go back to school. She'd always been good in math, and so the desire was born to become an accountant--before she was 40. But the boys were little and needed a caretaker. Full tuition and help at home would strain the family finances, so she decided to ask her father for assistance. His words, as she etched them into my brain: "You're supposed to marry an accountant. Not be one."
So she did it on her own. Accountants, psychologists, songwriters, professors, advertising women--things we'd never dreamed of. Indeed, how far we had come.
The Producer arrived mid-party, alone, clad in a little white tee and black patent-leather pants. I was deep in conversation, and when I turned around again she was gone. But the image stuck.
We had surprised ourselves, we women. We had become something, tasted success. But The Producer was eating it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. High tea, too. As we came into ourselves, she left the signs of hers behind. We could laugh it off as Hollywood style, but I still wonder if it wasn't simply good- (bad) old-fashioned-woman style. Was she trying to tell us that at the highest levels of success, it is too dangerous for a woman to look too strong? No wonder she felt disconnected. And no wonder she couldn't stay.
--Advertising executive, age 51
#2
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