Reunion
Although I missed the 10th high-school reunion, I did just attend the 20th. There I saw Meredith, Michele, Lila, Walter, Doug, Nate, Ed (the Red), a few others that I came to recognize, and, of course, spouses and children. I did not take pictures, but at least Michele, Lila, and---at a Sunday afternoon gathering at her house---Walter's mother did. I even did a few back flips, one of which was caught by Po on video.
Michele's daughter (Thia, I think) has a bizarre and entertaining method of locomotion, the one-legged scoot. My oldest, Kayleigh (who will be driving, with me in the passenger seat, a few weeks after our return to Colorado), used a hands-and-feet bear crawl in order to delay walking, about fourteen years ago. Still, I have also a seven-month-old, who will hopefully make her own way, a few months from now, across the frontier of walking.
As I feared, I was recognized by more persons than I recognized, but the pleasure of seeing old friends more than made up for the embarrassment of bad memory. The most interesting pattern in my opinion is that whereas every woman's appearance is largely unchanged from that of her graduation photograph, every man's appearance has changed almost beyond recognition. (And the latter is actually a good thing. :^)
Michele's daughter (Thia, I think) has a bizarre and entertaining method of locomotion, the one-legged scoot. My oldest, Kayleigh (who will be driving, with me in the passenger seat, a few weeks after our return to Colorado), used a hands-and-feet bear crawl in order to delay walking, about fourteen years ago. Still, I have also a seven-month-old, who will hopefully make her own way, a few months from now, across the frontier of walking.
As I feared, I was recognized by more persons than I recognized, but the pleasure of seeing old friends more than made up for the embarrassment of bad memory. The most interesting pattern in my opinion is that whereas every woman's appearance is largely unchanged from that of her graduation photograph, every man's appearance has changed almost beyond recognition. (And the latter is actually a good thing. :^)
posted by Unknown @ 6:53 PM
2 Comments:
At 12:29 AM,
cvo said…
I talked to Walter briefly, and he had the same general impression as Michele.
I'm all for getting together every year or couple of years and not waiting for a wedding or funeral to do it.
I also second the feeling that I am lucky to have made such good friends in high school. In the 20 years since graduation, I have found very few people that I have wanted to call a "friend" because of the high standards set by all of you.
At 7:59 PM,
Meredith said…
Like Tom, I didn't attend our 10th, which undoubtedly made this one more interesting because of the dramatic changes in so many of our former classmates. As we were waiting in line to check in, I looked around and wondered who all those old people were, and was it really possible they graduated the same year I did?
Our crowd, of course, has aged very gracefully, with the exception of Lila. Lila has not aged one bit. Clearly, Lila has made a pact with the devil.
I too found most of the conversation fairly dull, present company excepted of course. The music was too loud for comfortable conversation, so when I did happen to stumble upon the occasional person of interest, I had a hard time carrying on a meaningful discussion. In hindsight, I'm pretty sure that at one point I answered a question about how many children I have with something like, "We live in Austin now, how about you?"
Then of course, there were a couple of truly surreal moments involving (1) a guy who tried desperately to get me to remember that I broke his toe and then later smoked weed with him (I did neither), and (2) the odd little man who I've been avoiding for the last 20 years, who made a joke to my husband about stalking me.
Nonetheless, I really enjoyed the weekend because of you guys. I consider myself very lucky to count you among my friends.
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