July 22, 2018

A large group of us toured old Ellet, which has two more years of life before being replaced by a colossal new building looming behind it. It sobered us to think it was built in the year we were born. A building should outlast a single human life.  It was as I remembered it, if a little dingier, the atmosphere a little closer. Most of my classmates were unrecognizable until they told me their names. They claimed that I look the same, though with gray & wrinkles (I added that last part) They seemed to remember me as having forever been on stage or doing something outlandish. I remember one as being a minor commitment, and the other hardly at all.  Frank Barbieiri told an anecdote of having scored high on his SAT exam, but being called to the office to be interrogated about how close he had sat to me. They were apparently used to my leaving everyone in the dust on aptitude tests, and his high score must have meant he cheated off me. I apologized for an unknowing trespass fifty years old. Chuckled about it privately. The reunion dinner itself at a country club in Green was what one hopes such a thing will be. It restored my sense of community going back decades. It restored my sense of belonging. I feel “normalized.” I’m one of the class’s success stories—THE success story if you leave aside children and grandchildren. My success in their eyes—at least as they express it—is greater than it is in my own. Jim W cornered me and told me the gradual and precise story of his failed life from graduation day to the moment we stood beside the buffet line. His getting written confirmation of “brain damage” seemed to be the reason for the story, as if to say of people’s perceptions of him “it wasn’t my fault.” I felt it necessary to listen, as he remembered every detail of my public life in high school. Maybe he was excusing himself to all through me. Frank M and Tom W are still handsome. The men have, by and large, decayed more than the women. Some people claim they don’t remember anything. I remember for them. I talked very little to the people who dwell most on my mind.