Last week I drove to Jacksonville, Florida to attend my 60th high school reunion. I thought this would definitely be the last one. My Class of 1964 has been reuniting every five years (1969, 1974, 1979, 1984, 1989, 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019, 2024) without fail; I only lost two of them. Fortunately, our class has a dedicated core group that has never left Jacksonville, and the group does all the behind-the-scenes work for each occasion. Without these thoughtful and committed colleagues, meetings don’t happen as regularly and thoughtfully.
As I drove south, I thought about what might be the outcome of this event. Here’s my discovery: We all looked exactly like a group of 77 or 78 year olds should. And, perhaps most importantly because it is more than a superficial comment – we all know loss. You could see it in the lines of our faces, the sadness in our eyes, the wrinkles on the backs of our hands, the arthritic, crippling directions our fingers now point. We have lost parents, of course, especially many years ago. More recently, we have lost spouses, siblings, children and grandchildren. They died from suicide, drugs, alcohol and debilitating terminal illnesses.
When we gathered at the host hotel, we greeted each other with glimpses of possible recognition and then found certainty when our eyes met the faces in our senior yearbook photos affixed to our name tags. For many of us, the old face is not the one we know now; we were in search of the one we knew. I found myself remembering, half a century ago, more friends, who I was, saying out loud my original name — not the one I’d used for nearly half a century. I also realized how much I liked saying my old name – the one I got from my father, the one I was born with.
High school reunions after half a century become time travel that isn’t science fiction. We gathered in smaller groups and started telling stories about where we were and who we were—the first days of driving our parents’ cars, that first taste of freedom with typewriter ink still dripping from our new driver’s licenses. We retell the stories that (perhaps over the years we have told our grandchildren hundreds of times) now have an audience that includes the same people who were once in the car with us. Only this audience knows what you mean when you say the name of a road, indicate a neighborhood building, refer to the father of someone who passed away a long time ago, remember a friend’s house. The rest of us have the mental image that we are already correcting, expanding, and perhaps most importantly, laughing at. And laughter is different now – it’s the kind of loud, contagious, authentic, moving, soul-cleansing laugh. This is the best kind of audience for these long-running conversations and stories. For here is the group who testified, alongside us, in the same car – now, metaphorically, on the same path where, together, we made our way to the old men we have become.
For two days, I didn’t hear a word about the various paths we’ve taken since graduating high school—who we married, what we did, where we lived, which political side we chose. There was a lot to say, now, about that period of our lives that was really ours alone – simply because we were together then. Of course there were moments of sharing the sad losses because perhaps these people didn’t know. And with the innocent laughter of old stories also comes confidence and a kind of intimate honesty. We may not know the specifics of these losses to each other, but we know our own losses and feel what is being said. The room goes from raucous laughter to a silent, almost sacred stillness as these sad moments are shared. As I returned home late Sunday morning, I realized that the reunion had perhaps been the best kind of vacation – without thinking about the problems of the present – just a little trip back in time to the days of my own innocence, where laughter was plentiful. .
Margaret Earley Whitt He is a retired university professor and lives in Gerton.
