The moment everyone alternately looks forward to and fears has finally come upon me. The 20th reunion of my New Providence High School class will be held next month.
I’m not going, almost exclusively for logistical reasons. The reunion is being held November 24, the day after Thanksgiving, in Martinsville, NJ (wherever that is); we’ll be having family to Wheaton, IL the day before. I’m not going to drop everything (as well as $500 on air fare, $120 to rent a car, and $150 for a hotel room) to go to a party for three or four hours. If I could do that, I would have gone to Mary Louise and Lauri’s annual Halloween party in Alphabet City last Saturday, or I’d fly to the St. Martin’s Press reunion a week from today.
Knowing this would occur sooner or later (and with the Internet age upon us, it’s much easier to track classmates who have fallen by the wayside) has given me mixed feelings on the whole subject. On the one hand, I have not kept in touch with anyone from the Class of 1980 at NPHS. (I made two close friendships with people two years ahead and one year behind me, respectively – but that was by virtue of their employment at St. Martin’s Press. The fact they went to the same high school I did was purely coincidental; we barely knew one another as students.) The last person I really talked to on a regular basis from my high school class was my hair stylist, and I haven’t talked to her in 13 years.
High school was a period where my social contacts were just about nonexistent, and I wasn’t so intelligent that my grades would have gotten me into a prestigious university on their own. (I did go to an Ivy League school, but I suspect my father and grandfather having gone there before me helped.) I didn’t have too many close friends, I participated in several activities but none that would require consistent contact in a social setting, I didn’t date. The most regular part of my social life was meeting with a youth church group, but the church wasn’t in the same town as my high school, so overlap was virtually nil. Unless there are more people who remember me as a good buddy that I recall, or several women nursed unrequited crushes on me (if they did, they should have let me know), no one will be devastated if I don’t show up.
On the other hand, part of the fun of a reunion is to compare and contrast one’s life since graduation, and hopefully coming out ahead of everybody else. So here are the Five Comparison Points (and where I stand on each, in case anybody at the reunion reads this and keeps score):
1. Hair – still got it, men? (Yes, happily. The only part of my looks I can be vain about is my luxurious mane.) Gone gray, both sexes? (Nope.) [Important note: almost no one’s hair should look like it did in their high school graduation photo if one graduated between 1970 and 1987. I myself had what looked like a perm (it wasn’t; wearing a corduroy suit on a 85° day curled up my hair), and there were others with worse.]
2. Physique – how much weight have you gained since high school? (Not so good. I’m about 25-30 pounds over what someone of my size should be. Since I’m 6’ 3-1/2”, though, I can carry this off without looking too tubby. On the other hand, since my health club is in the ground floor of my apartment, I have no excuses. Damn you, carbohydrates, damn you!)
3. Love Life – married? (Yes, nine years. This may be the biggest surprise of all to my high school class; I suspect I was voted Most Likely to Die a Virgin.)
4. Home Life – kids? (Not yet. Karen was in graduate school from two months before our marriage to December 1999, which meant not a lot of income. We only became a full two-income family again last month. Not that this should have made so much difference in the long haul.)
5. Work Life – what’s your job, and how far up the corporate ladder have you climbed? (Reasonably far, considering I moved away from the primary area where my trade publishing background is based. Management at an educational development house, albeit not high on the managerial chart.)
I think I enriched my life by going different places and becoming functional socially – Cornell University, where I was able to find friends with similar backgrounds, and St. Martin’s Press, full of plenty of folks who would rather have spent their nights reading than hanging out with the jocks. (In grade school and high school, I was inevitably the last kid picked for the teams, behind even the kid who had been on crutches with a broken leg until the week before. At SMP, I was one of the best volleyball players on the team, and ranked second in runs batted in my first year playing softball. Draw your own conclusions.) I even married someone I worked with at St. Martin’s.
Ultimately, while there are about five or ten people I’d really like to see, I won’t be able to relive that part of my life again this time around. (Perhaps in five years.) What I must remember, however, is despite everyone in my high school class being in their late 30s, there’s still a lot of life left to live. Billy Joel wrote a marvelous song called “The Night Is Still Young” which contemplates what he still wanted to do, despite having hit a similar age to mine. Of course, he also noted in a spoken-word monologue about writing the Brenda and Eddie portion of “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” about the popular guy from his high-school class who, ten years later, looked “like a caved-in ashtray.” “What the hell happened?” Joel asked.
“Peaked too early.”