Last week, I drove to Jacksonville, Florida to attend my 60th high school reunion. I thought for sure this would be the last time. My 1964 graduate has no fai every 5 years (1969, 1974, 1979, 1984, 1989, 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019, 2024) We gathered together. I only missed two of them. Fortunately, our class has a dedicated core of individuals who have never left Jacksonville, and the group does all the behind-the-scenes work at every turn. Without these caring and dedicated classmates, such regular and thoughtful reunions would not occur.
As I drove south, I wondered what I would get out of this event. Here's what I found: We all looked exactly how a 77- or 78-year-old crowd should look. And perhaps more importantly, it's not a superficial comment. We all experience loss. It can be seen in the wrinkles on our faces, the sadness in our eyes, the wrinkles on the backs of our hands, and the direction of our arthritic fingers. Of course, we lost both of our parents almost many years ago. Recently, we have lost spouses, siblings, children, and grandchildren. They die from suicide, drugs, alcohol, and debilitating terminal illnesses.
As we gathered at the host hotel, we greeted each other with a glimpse of what we might recognize, and when our eyes met the face in our yearbook photo on our name tag, I felt a sense of certainty. For many of us, the face we used to have is not the face we know now. We were looking for someone we used to know. I reminded myself of who I was half a century ago and reminded my friends of who I was by saying out loud my original name instead of the name I went by nearly half a century ago. I also realized how much I loved saying my old name, the name my father gave me and the name I was born with.
The high school reunion for the first time in half a century is not science fiction but time travel. We gathered in small groups and thought about where we had been and who we had been, when we had just started driving our parents' cars, when typewriter ink was dripping from our still-fresh licenses, our first freedoms. Let's start a story that will remind you of the taste of. We retell the story (which we've probably told our grandchildren a hundred times over the years), but now we have an audience that includes the same people who were once in the car with us. . You know what you mean when you say the name of a street, point to a building in your neighborhood, mention a parent who is no longer alive, or remember a friend's house. Just the audience. The rest of us already have that image in our minds, modifying it, expanding it, and perhaps most importantly, laughing. And the laughter is different now. It's the kind of laughter that is loud, contagious, genuine, heart-breaking, and soul-cleansing. This is the perfect audience for talks like this and reminiscences from the past. Because here is a group of people in the same car that we saw next to us. Now, figuratively speaking, we are walking the same path that we became old together.
The different paths we've taken since graduating high school: who we married, what we've done, where we've lived, what political positions we've chosen, and so on. For two days I couldn't hear a single word. There was so much to say about that period of our lives now that it was truly ours alone. Simply because we were together at the time. Of course, perhaps these people did not know, so there was a moment of sharing a sad loss. And in the innocent laughter of folk tales, there is also trust and a kind of intimate honesty. We may not know the details of these losses from each other, but we know our own losses and feel what is being said. As these sad moments are shared, the room goes from raucous laughter to an almost sacred silence. As I left for home late Sunday morning, I realized that this reunion was probably the best vacation I've ever had. I didn't think about the current dire situation, I simply traveled back in time to innocent days filled with laughter.
Margaret Early Witt He is a retired university professor and lives in Girton.
