I just returned from having lunch with my high school classmates. I didn't go to the last reunion. I've only seen a few of these people who live here locally like me in thirty years. I was surprised that a big crowd showed up. All of us seemed to be in the same predicament. We had to look at the name tags to know who each other were. We were teenagers together back when teenagers became a special breed.
Adults were so fascinated by the advent of television that they paid less attention to what their children were doing, and we all watched Rebel Without A Cause, became James Dean with ducktail haircuts, and defiantly drank beer and bragged about sexual encounters that never happened. Candidly, the '57 Chevy was more prominently remembered than the Class of '57. Seems like the most prominent people to come out of our era graduated in the years before '57 or the years after. By comparison, we seemed like a bunch of bums more interested in having a good time than trying to own the world.
Well, that's what I thought back then, but at this reunion of the same people fifty odd years later, I realize that I'm the only bum amongst the entire crowd. Many of them have had very successful lives and are dying to tell you every last detail. No blame. They seem puzzled I have chosen to live like they have. I don't actually have a believable answer. I get told I've tried to figure that out more persistently than most. What I'm beginning to understand is that I'm already past the place where anybody can legitimately question whatever I chose to say is true, so I say anything to check it out. They don't know, and soon enough, they don't care, and enter whatever walking trance they're capable of.
There was this one guy who has piqued my curiosity over the years in the sense that I wondered what became of him. I wasn't particularly looking for him at the luncheon, but I was invited to sit at the only seat left at this one table, and it turned out that he was sitting right beside me. I didn't recognize him until I saw his name tag. He became a banker. He hasn't retired yet. He got fired up about professional hockey and became a big fan of the Hurricanes.
Another guy became a veterinarian. He seemed to have gone out of his way to make sure he spoke to me when I arrived, and then approached me to talk about how much he appreciated how my father had helped him during high school. I felt like I had to apologize to him for being curt with him the last time we saw each other. Practically everyone who spoke to me mentioned my father and how they had interacted.
I took this veterinarian and another guy who had been one of my father's favorite students as a case study to see if what I've whined about for a long time made any sense to anybody but me. The other guy was even the President of the FFA club all the way through school.
I told them that I'd always been jealous of how much time my father spent with them instead of spending it with me. I felt astonished that they both immediately agreed with me that I might have good cause, and admitted that my father spent a lot of time with them to make them feel special. Since they went for that, I told that I had other bad feeling from in the past that my parents both took their teaching jobs home with them, and treated me more as a student than their oldest son. They agreed that sounded about right, and I stopped there not wanting to push my luck.
Going to this reunion was a lot different that the Class of '57 reunion I went to as a guest of a former classmate at the school I attended before we moved here when I was in the sixth grade. I didn't go to high school with those people, and even though a couple of them remembered something about me, what they actually remembered was my father being a teacher there. I didn't like being there. It was a mistake to go. In doing it I realized that my friendship with the guy back then was one-sided. He barely remembered me at all, and was kind of snotty about even that.
Despite my initial misgivings I had a good time gathering with my old classmates. They didn't wanna relive the past except when we were children together. I have written about how my father treated me like a dumb fuck when I was a kid and accused me many times of not having the mental resources my classmates had, but apparently that's not what they thought. Why am I always the last to know?
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
