Class of 1965

In the past several weeks a whirlwind organizing campaign has taken place to stage a reunion for the 1965-66 graduating classes of Jericho High School. I am a member of the former, and due to prior commitments which I wouldn’t consider forgoing for a minute, I will not be able to attend.

Every day, names from the distant past cross my desktop. People I have not thought about in forty years, stand suddenly before me. Sometimes they even talk to me. Of course, I can’t see them except as seventeen year olds, but they keep mentioning their grandchildren and their retirement homes, and there seems to exist a serious divide between my memory and the reality about which I read. Nevertheless, these people are occupying my dreams and disturbing my days.

What’s going on? The search for graduates indicates that some of these people have kept in touch over the years. Someone seems to know where someone else is presently living. They even seem to know about those who are no longer living. And I am gazing back over this huge expanse of time and I see nothing except the other side of forty one years across the chasm. There is nothing alive between those two points, no companions, no landmarks, no sounds. And this awareness is causing me discomfort. I’m disoriented as forty-one years imposes itself on me unawares and unbidden. There are emotions I am experiencing which I had seriously repressed, and there is something about the conversation on line which is reproducing some of my adolescent angst and insecurities and terrors. I am suddenly thrust back there, but I thought that I had moved on, dammit. And this great chasm also isolates my high school years, as if they occurred in a vacuum. A basement window with no egress.

What would I do at a reunion with people I have not seen in forty-one years? Why haven’t I seen them in forty-one years? Ah, there’s the rub, isn’t it?

I am used to leaking and being leaked upon; I’ve grown unskilled at small talk, and I don’t carry pictures. Maybe I’ll send my books in my stead. It's where I’ve been.

That said, its been a great joy to find you again, Randy.