Who was she? She was elegant and beautiful: looked at least 20 years younger than our age. That wasn't all that unusual. At least half a dozen of the women at the reunion had defied the laws of human physiology and simply had not aged since the 80s. It was that I had no idea, whatsoever, who she was. Everybody else at the reunion did, but I didn't. She wasn't a spouse of a classmate. She was a Tallmadge High graduate. Her date was a guy who everybody knew. He clearly knew her. She had apparently attended High School with me, based on her Facebook profile. The way she interacted with all the other Facebook friends indicated that, without a doubt, she was part of the class of '83. I had no clue, though.
I recognized about half the folks at the reunion on sight. With half of the rest, I could suss it out after studying their faces for a few seconds. The remainder? It took a glance at the name tag. There were just a few, though, who I honestly didn't have any recollection of at all.
The reunion weekend was something I had looked forward to for thirty years. I had complicated matters by completing my requirements early and graduating with the class of '82. So, for the past thirty years, I've been getting notifications of their reunions, but not from my class. Tallmadge is a small town and back then it didn't have much of a transient population. So, a good number of these folks are people I attended kindergarten and first grade with. I wanted to attend the reunions for class of '83.
It wasn't until Facebook that I was able to get in contact with a critical mass of classmates and was able to get on the mailing list for this reunion. 30 years later. That is a long, long time.
I had some apprehension about attending. For those who have followed my ups and downs, 2012 was a bit of a disaster for me. I got beat on pretty hard by an unfortunate series of events that upended most aspects of my life. 2012 was the year when I sold off what was left of my business, finished my divorce, and had to take a job that largely takes me away from my son. It was, in the vernacular, "a shitty year."
I have felt like a loser for a while, now. Strange, it's just a habit you get into, even when things are on the upswing. So, part of me was a little reluctant to go show my loser self off to all my classmates. If I had made my 20 year reunion, I would have just come off of my Ironman Lake Placid finish and would have been at the height of my corporate career. At the 25 year point, I was a millionaire (at least on paper) and at the helm of the company I had started.
As it stood, I didn't get to see those folks until my 30th reunion, at a time in my life when I was rebuilding. I was going to meet my High School classmates at a time when I was in the process of trying to figure out what I was going to do next with my life. Which means, basically, I hadn't really made any progress in the past 30 years.
If anything, I'd regressed. At least in the 80s, I had hair. (In case I made things sound too bleak for dramatic effect, don't be concerned. I have a great job with the DoD and am doing fine. It's just a huge adjustment from the way things were before the economy tanked.)
I missed a lot of folks who I really wished I could see. Somebody mentioned that some of them will probably never come back to a reunion because they hated high school so much. I hated high school, too, but not because of my classmates.
Really, when I think back on my school years, what strikes me most was not how horrible my classmates were, but how really nice most of them were. I won't paint a Pollyanna picture here. There were some kids who were pretty mean. It's a phase for most folks. I'm sure I did things and said things I should regret, if only the memory weren't mercifully concealed by the fog of adolescence.
It was give and take, too. There are a couple of folks where I sorta flinch at the prospect of meeting. Then, I think about it and realize that I'm basing this phobia on something that happened when we were 12 years old. They've probably grown just like I have.
That's the jungle of middle school, mostly. Lots of hormones and immaturity, combined with adult capability to inflict emotional duress on people if you're of a mind to be careless.
There were kids who were picked on. (A few of them, in particular, were picked on so mercilessly I will probably always carry at least a little guilt for even being in the same school when it was happening.)
So, it wasn't perfect. It had commonality with the school experience everywhere.
That having been said, for the most part folks just sorta did their thing on their way to who they would eventually become, especially once they hit High School. Folks were basically civil. Differences were generally appreciated.
After I graduated, I'd see teen movies where the jocks were mean and stuffed nerdy kids into lockers, etc. I never quite got that. The jocks in my school were always pretty nice. For years, I thought maybe it was because I was a self-imposed nerd. I had been a starter on the Freshman football team before I stopped playing sports and became a guitar nerd. Now, though, I am old enough to know that most of them had no idea who the first-stringers were on the Freshman team. Hell, it's pitiful that I knew. They were nice to me because they were nice people. Beginning and end of story right there.
I hit Facebook to to try and brush up on the 3 or 4 people who I honestly didn't remember from school. I was actually Facebook friends with her. Like most of my Facebook friends, though, we probably connected just because we were part of the same group, not because we had been actual friends. Her name gave me no clue at all. But that was a married name. What about her maiden name? No. Nothing. I vaguely remembered it, but for the life of me, I can't connect it to her face. I would have remembered an attractive female classmate. I thought I knew everybody in my class by name. What about her date, everybody knew him... is there a clue in there somewhere? Who did he date in High School? No clue. I have no idea who this woman is... I can place every other single person at this reunion, but her.
High School was awful for me not because of what High School was, or who the other kids were, but because of who I was. I had a difficult family situation, no money and was one of only a small handful of ethnic minorities at the school. Difficult to fathom today.
I worried that my son might feel isolated being that he's 1/4 Korean heritage. Those fears are poorly founded. Bedroom communities like the one I grew up in are full of Asian people these days. The halfback who runs behind him on his middle school football team is named Chan Jin. It's just not something kids today are bothered with thinking about.
I was also gangly and awkward. Had crazy hair, bad complexion and a nerd's personality. I also thought it was funny to verbally cut people down now and then. It's hard to know, this long after the fact, whether I was just doing the normal amount of schoolyard putdowns or whether I was genuinely mean to folks. For anything I may have ever said that hurt another kid, I am genuinely sorry and carry that regret to this day. I can only pray that I never said anything that truly hurt a person, but the trouble with being careless is that you just can't know.
From a sociological perspective, I had a lot of early indicators of a youth at risk, and I think most of my classmates would be alarmed to know that I walked pretty far down that path before turning my life around in the Army.
When I think back on my time at school, though, it's as though nobody judged me for any of that. There was never a time when I didn't have friends. Folks accepted me as I was. The jocks and cool kids weren't mean in my school. They knew you, would say hello to you and accepted pretty much everybody. It was a place more like college than high school, I think. It was a place where kids had the space to explore and try different things. A place where you may not know how to "be yourself", yet, but everybody seemed to give you the space to make the effort.
It could have been so much worse, and it is so much worse for so many kids. I was lucky.
In teen movies, the typical arc of the story involves a sensationally beautiful girl who wears glasses and a ponytail. Eventually, she takes off the glasses, gets big hair and then everybody is stunned at the transformation. It is, along with Superman's glasses, the stupidest plot device in the history of drama. Cute girls in high school don't fly under the radar just because they wear glasses. That's not real life. That's not how it happens.
The first night of the reunion was an informal get together at a sports bar. I connected to good friends I had been close to in middle school. Hung out with others who reminded me of how close we had been as friends in the 3rd grade. That is half the beauty of these reunions to me: these people literally knew you when you were a child. When you think of them, you think of things like the time they blew milk out of their nose while laughing in the 2nd grade.
Another grade school friend said he felt bad for poking me in the face with a pencil in the 1st grade. Trouble was, he didn't do it. I slipped and fell on a pencil I was carrying and poked myself in the face. It was gruesome: went all the way through my cheek. Lots of blood and I ended up going to the hospital.
I can only imagine that since we were friends and he was only six, that he felt bad that I'd had that accident. I also imagine that our teacher came in and yelled at the class because we'd been roughhousing during an indoor recess. So, over the years, his memory had played tricks on him and convinced him that he had done it.
I hope he didn't lose any sleep over that one. I straightened the story out so he can at least rest easy from now on.
Some guys from the basketball team were at a table and honestly, they looked like they could take the court today. They were all fit, tall and didn't look that much different, other than the random gray hair here or there. If there's a Gus Macker 30-year reunion category, these guys would clean house.
It took me a while to realize that nobody here thought I was a loser. I was able to relax almost immediately. Nobody was wondering how the hell you go from a seven-figure net worth to zero in 3 years. Nobody thought that only an idiot marries a supermodel-gorgeous woman and divorces her twelve years later. Nobody was questioning what sort of dad has to take a job that takes him away from his son most weeks.
Just like when I was in high school, my anxieties were based on things inside myself. These people were just happy to see me. These were the people I grew up with. The folks I rode the bus with. Now, as then, we're all in our own lives.
Tallmadge was not, by and large, a place where you judged other people for what they were doing or not-doing. The middle class was different in the 1970s. Unions were still strong. Your neighbor could have been anything from a rubber worker at Goodyear to an office worker at Goodyear. Okay, some of them worked for Firestone and BF Goodrich. Seriously, though, the middle class was more diverse, then. Your neighbor could have been a plumber or a professor at a university. So, there was more of a sense of respect for every family and their contribution to society and the community. Not everybody's parents went to college.
You didn't have to be a millionaire: it was enough to simply be a decent person. It was a place with industrial midwestern sensibilities where you worked on your own life and if you were lucky, you got to take joy in the lives of others.
I hadn't seen most of these people in 30 years and all it took was a few minutes with them and our friendships took off right from where we'd left off. I didn't have to be a millionaire for these folks to accept me. It was enough that we were friends when we were kids.
That maiden name. It looks familiar. There was that girl... no... no way...
It was 1977. The most anxiety-producing part of gym class in Junior High, other than our first communal showers, was square dancing. I can only figure that somebody, while designing the curriculum, thought this was a good way to introduce social skills to boys and girls in a form of dancing that's as far from twerking (though that didn't exist at the time) as it could possibly be.
For those not-familiar, square dancing is country and western dancing where 4 couples dance while standing in proximity (sort of like the 4 corners of a square) and a person yells directions to them. The thing is, they yell these directions while also telling you to do these things to the left or the right. So, for instance, "left allemand your partner", or "dosey-do to the right."
This was a problem for me on so many levels. The first and most obvious was that I didn't know my right from my left. I knew they existed as concepts. If I thought about it long enough, I could figure out which was which, but there is a psychological disorder where people can't tell their right from their left. I have it. So does my aunt. I've heard that children who have this disorder never crawled as babies, they sat up and scooted around on their butts. So, it's a real thing and it was a real problem for me in the seventh grade.
That, though, was the least of my worries. The worst part was that boys and girls were left to their own devices to chose a square dancing partner. Oh. My. God.
I was a pimply, gangly, awkward, nerdy, Asian kid wearing garage sale clothing who, since the school wasn't air-conditioned, probably actually smelled bad. This was going to be difficult.
I can't speak to women today, but in the seventh grade? If they had offered the option of taking a beating, instead, I would have chosen the beating. This was required, though and we were actually graded on it. So... I mustered up my courage and approached a girl I'd known since grade school, who was actually sort of a family friend. Had a brief exchange and got the vibe that she'd rather chew glass than to be put into a situation where she would have to physically touch me, then slinked off before the exchange could get any more humiliating.
The couples were pairing off quickly. Seventh grade had combined a few grade-schools, so I didn't know half the people in my seventh grade class when school started. Over across the room I saw a cute little girl standing by herself. She was pretty. Hair pulled back. Face partially concealed by the gigantic glasses that were popular at the time.
"Do you wanna square dance?"
The response took less than a second, but I am certain that Einstein is right about the relativity of time because I think I aged 3 years during that second.
"Okay."
Thank. You. Jesus.
Trouble is, I wasn't out of the woods. Remember that old left-right thing? Yeah. That didn't go away.
You can see the end of this story almost before it begins. I faked my way through much of the dancing, but at a critical time, he told me to go left, I went right. She was a tiny girl, wearing the glasses that were fashionable at the time, which means that her glasses were probably the physcially largest thing about her at the moment. And... *smack* right into her glasses which made an alarming crunching sound.
Oh my god, the kindest girl in the 7th grade and I just broke her glasses by smashing them into her face. Even after this unintentional physical assault that resulted in destroying... I dunno... her means of seeing... she was gracious and kind and completed the next few days of the square dancing segment of PE without demanding a different, less-destructive dance partner.
The last name is the same, but is that her? Is it? No. It can't be. But the more I thought about it, yes, it was. It was the same girl, minus the pony tail and glasses. And as a woman, she's probably hiding her absolutely beautiful freckles behind a flawless base-coat of makeup.
It is her. Mystery solved. I guess the movie makers really were right. There were stunningly beautiful women in my school disgused with glasses and pony tails. Thing is, they don't look better without the glasses and pony tail. They just look different. They were beautiful then, too. And in more than a few cases, they were beautiful inside as well.
The thing that's remarkable about the square dance story is not that it was a special moment. It really wasn't. In fact, I'd pretty much forgotten all about it until I was desperately trying to comb my memories for what I could connect to this classmate's maiden name.
What's remarkable is that when I think back on my school days, they were filled with thousands of small kindnesses that happened all the time. The kid who unexpectedly stood up for you, or the kid who took the time to pay you a compliment. The kid who was the big man on campus, but who didn't consider themselves too good to talk to the nerds and geeks. The girls who could have been cruel, but weren't. The kids who took you seriously at a point in your life when no sane person should have taken you seriously.
I was lucky to go to school when I did, with the people I did. I'm so glad we're back in touch after so many years. We basically grew up together.
Included in all the horrible things that happened in 2012, my grandmother, who raised me, passed away at the age of 94. (Yeah, 2012 was like that for me.)
I tried to visit her regularly when she was alive. So, in a way, it's good to reconnect with my classmates. I hope to get back to Tallmadge to see them a little more often than once every 3 decades from here on out. Reconnecting will give me more reasons to go home now and then.
Because, hey, it's good to stay in touch with the folks who knew you when you were nothing more than potential and dreams.
