Forty years since high school

    I just attended my 40^th high school reunion. I hadn’t intended to go a couple of months ago, but some of my friends emailed me with the expectation that I would be there.

   The reunion was held in the cafeteria (now called the student commons) of our Catholic girls’ high school. It mingled age groups ranging from the class of 1949 to the class of 2005. As such, it gave you a spooky sense of the arc of a woman’s life. The 23-year-olds shook their booty to DJ music while sucking down beer from the bottle. We 58-year-olds sat and talked and drank coffee.

    My class was not the oldest, but we aren’t young anymore. A couple of us had surgery in the past year: Me for  trigeminal neuralgia, my friend Ann for a brain tumor that was benign.(Ann first showed up on my doorstep when we were 5 and asked my mom, “Is this where Mary from my first-grade class lives?” I was terribly shy and always thought that was so brave of her to come in search of me.)

     Two of my classmates are widowed. One (the mother of 5) is divorced and her husband remarried, to a young chippy. One of my classmates suffered mental illness, but is stabilized on medication. We remembered a couple of my classmates who died: One was murdered, another died in a house fire with her four children.

    A number of my classmates who attended the reunion still have adult children living with them. But they don’t routinely cook for the children anymore.

   I had expected to see Pat C, who organized the 30-year reunion and who lives in the area. But apparently there were hard feelings when she listed one classmate as “in memoriam” and the woman was still very much alive.

    I loved my time in high school, but some of my classmates remembered a lot more about our school experience than I do. My friend Joanne (who was Miss School Spirit in senior year) remembered that one of the nuns said  that my boyfriend and I had such a public display of affection at a dance that we looked as though we were one.

    When one of my classmates…Louise F….learned that I grew up in Bergenfield, she asked,

”Do you know the Knights?”
      I responded, “Which Knights? The ones who had a police officer father?”

     “Yes,” said Louise. “Those are my first cousins.”

     “Well, then, we’re related,” I replied. “Because my sister Margaret was married to Greg Knight, although they’re divorced now. She and her twin grand-daughters – Greg’s granddaughters—were just visiting me last weekend for my future daughter-in-law’s shower.”

     Following the reunion, I went to the Internet to look up two schoolmates who hadn’t been there, but I was curious about…both smart, competitive girls, as I was. One is an MD specializing in geriatrics. The other was appointed a federal circuit court judge.

     My friend Joanne’s daughter is going into social work, like her mother, although Joanne wishes she wouldn’t. My third son is interested in journalism, although I wonder what future there is in journalism with the advent of the Internet. I told my son it says something when the Washington Post’s premier media columnist –Howard Kurtz – defects for a website like the Daily Beast.

     The reunion reminded me that certain challenges and major landmarks in our lives are substantially done with – initial career trajectory and parenthood. But there are both lingering responsibilities and new adventures ahead of us. And still we are alive, still we breathe, still we experience the time warp. We feel both 58 years old and 18.