Saturday morning at quarter to 11, we will meet where we met first, in 1964, at the front door of the elementary school.
Some 47 of us, about half the class, old men and women, to take a tour of the school and a walk through the past.
From the window of my kindergarten class I will be able to look out to the adjoining cemetery and see the graves of the teacher whose room that was, and her husband, and beyond through the trees to the stately Depression-era high school from which we walked 13 years later.
There was one reunion before, after 10 years, when we weren’t yet 30 and not quite adults.
But this one is 40, and if we are not over the hill we are damn near, and this meeting has for most of a year been a rising crescendo of anxiety and eagerness, reverie and uncertainty, and I am unsure if I want to run toward or run away. Toward a reunion with my idealized remembrance of the people and place of my raising, or away from the reality of then and now.
Those days were hard but precious, the worst and the best, a culture and community I once did everything I could to get away from, and then everything I could to get back to. After enough years you realize you can’t run away from who you are, and after 40 years this will be a hard look in the face of who I am.
You work hard to create a life, a reality of your own choosing, not the circumstance of your birth and rearing, and sometimes in your thoughts you fear that it is all an act. Is the self-made man an achiever or a fraud, have you built yourself up or are you simply running a massive con?
It all comes back to who you really are, and the belief that you can find that in who you really were, if you can even truly know that.
Nowhere are you more apt to find out than amongst those who knew you when.
When you had the ignorance and naivete, and the arrogance and certitude, of youth. When you stumbled over the simplest relationships, launched out on the most ridiculous quests, and lived life in a pure, impulsive and instinctive way.
And usually got it wrong.
There is an incomprehensibility to time. It exists as the defining law of the mortal universe, but in my heart and mind I deny it. In my psyche, in the mental arrangement of life, it does not exist, or at least its ravages don’t exist. In my mind, nothing changes. It all sits on an emotional shelf, a happy remembrance of stability and joy, a door through which I can walk and find it all unchanged, and waiting for me.
As these classmates have waited, in my mind, all these years.
They have lived long there, in the spring of 1977 and the handful of years before, gangly, budding, awkward folk, the dearest folk, the foundation folk. And in my mind we roam the same halls and sit through the same classes and listen to the same music as we did back then. Our parents are alive, our youth is abundant, our futures are bright.
The girls are still girls and the boys are still boys.
And the future is still long.
I know that time wipes that all away. I have been back to our town, I have walked its streets, I have been a stranger in my home place. I know that now is not then, and that there is no more then. I can reach out and touch it, it seems, but it is forever gone and out of reach. It is not just people who die, it is times and seasons of life.
And our reunion will also be a funeral, a memorial for what is gone.
Or a celebration of what is left.
Older, heavier, perhaps weathered and unrecognizable, but still here, still fighting on, still howling at the moon. Redefined by the decades passed, or maybe fundamentally the same. Making a show of who we are, or happily sneaking back to who we were. Dropped references to the size of our houses or the size of our paychecks, or howling recollections of our juvenile adventures.
Shaking the hands of the husbands of our secret crushes, making nice with our public rivals, seeing who went which way and why.
That’s what I imagine this reunion will be like.
And I will go to the front door of the elementary school the same way I went to it in 1964. With uncertainty and fear, excitement and hope, not really knowing what I will find there.