Observations...The Reunion
The late singer-songwriter Jim Croce had a big hit, "Time in a Bottle" years ago, and we couldn't help thinking about it as we attended our 49th high school reunion over the Labor Day Weekend. When you graduate from high school you don't think about the future the same way you do years later, from the backside.
After graduation, people scatter like flower petals in the wind. College, marriage, kids, divorce, more kids, failing body parts, a rush through life. And so a high school reunion is like uncorking the bottle, letting out the emotions and thinking about the past.
At the reception and dinner, we watched as the people we had gone to high school with, even grade school, entered the room. "I know that guy." We're not much on remembering names, even for a few minutes, much less nearly 50 years, and had it not been for name tags we would have been troubled to find out who was who.
Funny thing, after you realize who they are, you notice the small, familiar characteristics they possessed in high school, the way they speak, walk, move their lips, squint their eyes. Despite the years, these body signs have not changed.
Aging does strange things to us. It removes our hair or turns it gray, wrinkles our skin, stoops us, alters our walk and even our speech. Some 42 in our class have passed away over the years; others have fought or are fighting Cancer. In high school we never heard the word Cancer; maybe it didn't exist then. People died from other things. We remember the weight coach, fit as a fiddle, jogging around the neighborhood and then sitting down on the curb to die of a heart attack. Nowadays they would have saved him and had him dancing in two days.
How did we ever get through school without computers, CD players, MP3's, cell phones, DVD's, lasers, MRI's, and a gazillion others. The math boys carried slide rules on their belts, the first hand held computer. The dreaded higher math classes, trig, solid, calculus, were all done with nothing but pencil and paper.
Now, students have special parking spaces if they are named "students of the month."
We didn't drive cars to school, just our old bike, and there weren't any students of the month. Yeah, we walked uphill backwards in the snow and ice, both ways, and made 65 cents an hour on our part time job.
Our infamous principal which we had nicknamed "Hitler" is mentioned to this day by current students. What a guy.
So we watched as our former classmates gathered in their familiar groups to catch up on kids, grandkids and other stuff. We even discovered that a former classmate has lived around the corner on Honey Creek for several years. We didn't know. Somebody had the bright idea to print name tags in 12 point type so everybody had to squint and get real close to read the name. Maybe that was the purpose.
From our class of '57, more than 80 showed up; there were more than 800 from the classes in the 40's to the 80's, all having functions, teetering around town trying to find the old movie theatres we had all spent so much time in; looking for the dirt roads we used to "park" on, which have since changed to four laners. Kids nowadays just "get a room." We remembered our typing classes, using old Royals with a carriage return. High tech. We thought about old girl friends, the smell of their lipstick, and looked for the "hot chicks." They were not there.
Current high school students gave tours of the new fine arts center, with a 2,500 seat arena, and a 1,200 seat auditorium with state of the art sound, not to mention the $90,000 Steinway concert grand piano. It even has its own "garage" off the stage where it is kept under lock and key when not in use. Not hard to accomplish with sponsors like Arvest, Conoco Phillips and generous taxpayers.
The music area is stunning, with a room full of 13 Yamaha keyboards connected to computers, so students can write their own music. Beethoven would roll over. Several practice rooms, each with a piano; a huge band room with DVD displays for formations on the football field; a speech and drama classroom complete with all sorts of furniture and props, a carpenter shop for making props, and even two makeup rooms just like Hollywood. These come with the kitchen sink and washer and dryer, of course. The art classroom comes with manikins. What, no nude models? Of course, all the classrooms allow the teachers to use laptops and screens for instruction.
Egads, they took away the blackboards!
And then there's the new science wing with all sorts of test tubes, experimental areas, even a fish tank.
Lunch is at 12: 22. Not 12 noon or 12:15, but 12:22. They allow up to six minutes to get from class to class the place is so big. One thing hasn't changed: The Cafeteria. Still pretty grim.
Lots of students never left our hometown. Funny, they're the ones that usually skip reunions, although several organized this reunion and worked hard. Others came great distances. We had no way of knowing who had gotten rich, achieved the most in life, or had the most tragedy. Only one of our class had murdered anyone…his wife. After his acquittal trial, one of his kids said he wondered "why it took so long to kill the bitch." He skipped the reunion.
So the gathering ended. The cork was put back in the bottle after everyone had left, to wait another year or decade, when the crowd will be smaller. Too bad today's high school students can't fast forward the DVD to see 50 years ahead. Or maybe not.
After graduation, people scatter like flower petals in the wind. College, marriage, kids, divorce, more kids, failing body parts, a rush through life. And so a high school reunion is like uncorking the bottle, letting out the emotions and thinking about the past.
At the reception and dinner, we watched as the people we had gone to high school with, even grade school, entered the room. "I know that guy." We're not much on remembering names, even for a few minutes, much less nearly 50 years, and had it not been for name tags we would have been troubled to find out who was who.
Funny thing, after you realize who they are, you notice the small, familiar characteristics they possessed in high school, the way they speak, walk, move their lips, squint their eyes. Despite the years, these body signs have not changed.
Aging does strange things to us. It removes our hair or turns it gray, wrinkles our skin, stoops us, alters our walk and even our speech. Some 42 in our class have passed away over the years; others have fought or are fighting Cancer. In high school we never heard the word Cancer; maybe it didn't exist then. People died from other things. We remember the weight coach, fit as a fiddle, jogging around the neighborhood and then sitting down on the curb to die of a heart attack. Nowadays they would have saved him and had him dancing in two days.
How did we ever get through school without computers, CD players, MP3's, cell phones, DVD's, lasers, MRI's, and a gazillion others. The math boys carried slide rules on their belts, the first hand held computer. The dreaded higher math classes, trig, solid, calculus, were all done with nothing but pencil and paper.
Now, students have special parking spaces if they are named "students of the month."
We didn't drive cars to school, just our old bike, and there weren't any students of the month. Yeah, we walked uphill backwards in the snow and ice, both ways, and made 65 cents an hour on our part time job.
Our infamous principal which we had nicknamed "Hitler" is mentioned to this day by current students. What a guy.
So we watched as our former classmates gathered in their familiar groups to catch up on kids, grandkids and other stuff. We even discovered that a former classmate has lived around the corner on Honey Creek for several years. We didn't know. Somebody had the bright idea to print name tags in 12 point type so everybody had to squint and get real close to read the name. Maybe that was the purpose.
From our class of '57, more than 80 showed up; there were more than 800 from the classes in the 40's to the 80's, all having functions, teetering around town trying to find the old movie theatres we had all spent so much time in; looking for the dirt roads we used to "park" on, which have since changed to four laners. Kids nowadays just "get a room." We remembered our typing classes, using old Royals with a carriage return. High tech. We thought about old girl friends, the smell of their lipstick, and looked for the "hot chicks." They were not there.
Current high school students gave tours of the new fine arts center, with a 2,500 seat arena, and a 1,200 seat auditorium with state of the art sound, not to mention the $90,000 Steinway concert grand piano. It even has its own "garage" off the stage where it is kept under lock and key when not in use. Not hard to accomplish with sponsors like Arvest, Conoco Phillips and generous taxpayers.
The music area is stunning, with a room full of 13 Yamaha keyboards connected to computers, so students can write their own music. Beethoven would roll over. Several practice rooms, each with a piano; a huge band room with DVD displays for formations on the football field; a speech and drama classroom complete with all sorts of furniture and props, a carpenter shop for making props, and even two makeup rooms just like Hollywood. These come with the kitchen sink and washer and dryer, of course. The art classroom comes with manikins. What, no nude models? Of course, all the classrooms allow the teachers to use laptops and screens for instruction.
Egads, they took away the blackboards!
And then there's the new science wing with all sorts of test tubes, experimental areas, even a fish tank.
Lunch is at 12: 22. Not 12 noon or 12:15, but 12:22. They allow up to six minutes to get from class to class the place is so big. One thing hasn't changed: The Cafeteria. Still pretty grim.
Lots of students never left our hometown. Funny, they're the ones that usually skip reunions, although several organized this reunion and worked hard. Others came great distances. We had no way of knowing who had gotten rich, achieved the most in life, or had the most tragedy. Only one of our class had murdered anyone…his wife. After his acquittal trial, one of his kids said he wondered "why it took so long to kill the bitch." He skipped the reunion.
So the gathering ended. The cork was put back in the bottle after everyone had left, to wait another year or decade, when the crowd will be smaller. Too bad today's high school students can't fast forward the DVD to see 50 years ahead. Or maybe not.
posted by Editor | 1:02 AM
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