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In an hour and a half I'm going to a Pizza Inn restaurant to have lunch with the remaining members of the Class of '57. It's only been what seems like a few months since the last time we met. That was the first reunion I'd attended since the 20th one. I got drunk and made a big fool of myself by insulting some people I expected to understand sarcasm as my favorite modality for expressing humor, but they didn't. I was truly shocked they were that limited in scope, but eventually I realized their lack of scope is the status quo.
On the other hand, I didn't really know what they meant when they would say that I was one of the smart people in the class. I didn't make really good grades in my classes, but I was told directly by teachers that my grades were in the upper third of my class.
I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that my family returned to Mississippi every summer for a couple of weeks for my parents to visit their parents and siblings. For me it was just another activity I didn't have any choice about participating in. I didn't think of our going to Mississippi as "traveling", as exemplified by the adage, "Travel broadens."
This must have seemed strange to the kids my age who thought getting to go to the capitol of North Carolina some sixty miles north of here gave them a real cosmopolitan outlook on life. I had a friend I hope to see today whose mother and father brought him here from Pennsylvania when he was pre-school like I was brought here from Mississippi, and I thought for a long time that Pennsylvania was a country in Europe, and I felt cool because I was hanging out with a foreigner.
Gotta go get dressed now. I'll write my impressions of the reunion when I get back.
There were around forty people at the luncheon/reunion. I recognized more people this time without their name tags, but it was still convenient to have them to glance at to be sure i knew who I was talking to. I made sure I sat with a difference group of people this time just to get to know them better. It shocks me a little that my former classmates seem to have a better opinion of me than I had previously thought. They seem more friendly and open toward me each time we get together. I suspect they always were, and it was me that thought different.
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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.
