There was a girl I didn’t recognize in a flare pink flare skirt with a poodle on it, who seemed to love when the rock and roll music started. Another man showed off in our school colors, with orange and blue tennis shoes.
We all wore nametags with pictures of ourselves at 17. “I look pretty much the same, don’t you think?” I heard one woman ask her friend from forty-some years ago.
“You look just the same,” her friend answered.
No she didn’t, I remembered the photo on her chest too.
In fact, I remembered a lot of the “chest photos.” Those boys and girls live on in my mind. I like that they are there. I hated that a bunch of middle-aged people were wearing the pictures of my young friends. It was also uncomfortable to have to stare at their middle-aged torsos in order to identify them.
I felt like I was taking my child on a play date… except that the child I was taking was me.
I loved some things about this party. Like the laughter of a girl who starred at the poodle skirt and said she was jealous. Why was she jealous?
“Because everyone except me had a skirt, just like that one, poodle and all. My mom, in an attempt to please me, went shopping and returned home, triumphantly, with a pink felt skirt. Only problem was that It had a lamb on it, instead of a poodle. “Cheaper,” she had explained. I was devastated and she never understood.
One other used-to-be girl said she forgave the man sitting at her table for breaking up with her to go out with the women sitting on his left who he married forty-five years ago. She said that forgiving was easy because of the used–to-be boy, sitting on her right who has been her adoring husband for almost as long.
Then there was a slide show. There I was, one of three yellow Bayside High lions, complete with lion ears and yellow fishnet stockings!
The cheerleaders looked as beautiful as I had remembered. They survived their young image since not one of them was at this party. I wonder why.
I also wonder why nobody sang the school song.
Or why so many of the male heartthrobs of my class didn’t show. I was really looking forward to how they had held up. I admit it.
Why I had come 3000 miles to go to this party? I think it was to check out a reflection of a girl I once new. I was here to measure myself against my peers, my cohorts. How have I held up?
Held up? That sounds awful. By what standard? There was no time for real sharing. I never got to hear about triumphs or challenges. . What about children? Never mind.
This was a beauty contest. Plain and simple. Do I look better than she does?
I had an advantage. I come from ”The OC”, Orange County, California, infamous land of “desperate housewives” and way too much botox. I’m glad I had a few injections before this trip. And a little sun. I’m really glad.
When all was said and done, I’m quite sure nobody cared about I looked like, however. They all cared about themselves. And you know what showed up the most?
Happiness
Maybe I was just paying a lot of attention, but it did seem easy to identify those who felt good about themselves.
I guess that’s true at any gathering of people. It’s just that at this one, and ones like it, people haven’t seen each other for a very long time. When last we met, most of us were brimming with excess promise.
We were winners. There was to be no stopping us. We were sure someone in our class would become President and someone else would sit on the Supreme Court. Another might become a major league athlete, or if he wanted to, a great musician. We would count among us, doctors, lawyers, giants in business and maybe even a Nobel prize winner or two. Someone would write the Great American Novel. Another might find the cure for cancer.
Some of us would travel the world as great adventurers, make significant contributions and/or take companies public. We’d be good parents and provide well for our children. Commencement was truly the beginning of a Camelot life for our upwardly mobile class.
I have no way of knowing how many of my classmates achieved their dreams. I hope they have. There were lots of people here who wore their happiness in the way they carried themselves. They looked beautiful. Perhaps that comes with the making peace part of middle age, the part that allows us to appreciate what we have actually accomplished and those who we have loved.
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