Now and Then

So it's the year for my 50th high school reunion and I remain ambivalent about whether I'll attend

High School Senior Lee

or not.  My lack of commitment comes not from bad feelings about the people I might see there or the way we might judge one another's changes over these 50 years. What I'm uncertain about is whether I want to relive those days of teen angst again.  Now so much more comfortable with myself than I was then, I have no desire to attempt a recreation of those days as if they were happier than I remember.  I find myself resisting, pushing away a commitment.

            In these five decades since graduation, I have kept in touch with the few who have  remained friends through all the changes that life has brought.  We have found love and have had our hearts broken.  Through it all, we few have been compelled by our affection for each other to make contact in some fashion, at least from time to time.           

            On any given day as I think about the gathering of those of us who dressed in robes and mortarboards to say goodbye to high school in 1964, I think about someone specific that I would like to see again, someone's story of the past 50 years that I want to hear.  The very next day I find myself returning to those years when we were alternately trying just to fit in and trying to be our own independent personages and I am reluctant to revisit the past at all.

            It was a frightening time.  We were grown, but not grown-up.  We were coming of age, leaving behind the innocence of childhood and its relative lack of judgment by our peers to face the paranoia of the teenage years.  Even as we sought to prove ourselves as burgeoning adults, the vulnerability of our dependence on friends, parents, teachers and others for approval and protection was still with us.           

            It was an exciting time, fueled by growing in stature so that we were as tall as our parents and beginning to believe that we were as capable as they to make decisions about our lives.  Our hormones raged, drawing our bodies toward physical intimacy with our peers while those same hormones perversely attacked our complexions with the humiliation of acne.  We sought to attract, but found ourselves repellent, faces marred by zits.

            We were, of course, our own worst enemies.  We stared into our bathroom mirrors, attempting to get our hair into just the right style.  If we had straight hair, curls were in.  If we were blessed with curls, we ironed our hair to emulate someone deemed more popular, the pretty girls with straight hair.  If nobody asked us to the dance, we agonized about ourselves, playing morose LP's until we fell asleep, grateful that the event would be over when we awoke.

            Our male classmates had their own similar struggles.  Only so many could make the football team; the others had to find a different way to demonstrate their manhood.  Like the girls, most kept any long-term dreams to themselves rather than risk the derision of their peers.  They tried so many ways to make themselves attractive.  I can almost smell still the overabundance of Old Spice that a classmate splashed on, probably cadged from his  father's dresser.  Some found being cool in learning to play guitar or drums to join a band.  [Brad Paisley and Keith Urban released a duet in 2004 called "Start a Band" that speaks to this.]

            There were, thank goodness, those who followed their own paths even then.  Some had musical talent and enough passion to play in the school band even if that did not improve their "cool" ratings.  Some simply couldn't quell their passion for debate, taking unpopular positions not because they wanted to be different, but simply because they were different.

            We had limited appreciation for different.  It was okay to a degree, but the herd mentality of adolescence sought common ground in behavior and in attire.  Our tendency was to mock differences, rather than embrace them.  Only in retrospect do I see the hurt we must have caused and I wonder what we missed when we chose to avoid those who were different rather than get to know them.

            In a public school where there was no dress code, we created one of our own.  Girls who were "in" wore Villager dresses in that time when pants were not the norm for girls.  Boys wore slacks, but not jeans to school except on the rare "jeans" days that were allowed.  A look through our high school annuals tells a fashion tale of another time, that time before today's "anything goes" styles.

            Now reconnected to some of these people via Facebook, I see them as they are now and I am drawn to their life stories after high school.  We've had careers, some more than one.  Some of us have married, had children, divorced and remarried.  Some of us have grandchildren and, I suppose,  some have great-grandchildren.  We have gained and lost weight, gained wrinkles and lost hair.  Some have battled serious illness.  We mourn some who lost that battle.

            And so I continue to waffle.  Will I go to this 50th reunion and learn where lives have taken us?  Even as I write this, leaning toward the decision to go, there is still ambivalence.  It remains a choice for another day, one that will continue to provoke reflection on a time that seems long ago and far away.