GO to Your Reunion!

I always tell myself “Go to the reunions!” but then this strange reticence overtakes me. Maybe it’s common to us all, the worrying that no one will talk to us but the classic what-do-I-wear dilemma weighs, I think more heavily on the females.Take my case.  I’m pretty sure I'm no longer in danger of going in a tangle of long Country-Western-style curls and a fringed leather miniskirt, but what if I end up walking into a room full of evening gowns, only to look down and find myself dressed like Pinocchio? Because, you know, this has happened.But then I remember what my 11-year-old said to me back in the late 90s when I was I fretting about what wear to wear to a certain wedding. “It's fine," he said not unkindly. ”Nobody's going to be looking at you, Mum.” True enough! And so it was that on a recent Saturday night I started getting ready. I climbed into this caramel pantsuit I had bought in the spring of 2012 only to realize I looked like the last cruller in the bin. A mist of cold sweat bloomed down my back. Then I spotted the black dress I had just for $69 in a catalog. I threw it on and headed for the car with my husband.That's when the great realization finally came on me: This wasn’t my reunion! This was HIS reunion! I wouldn't have to do a single thing but smile and listen as people spoke to him.I figured he would have an easy time too, because as the Class President and Football Captain, he's be remembered.He was remembered him. But if people remembered him, they also remembered one another, after the quick peer-down at the nametag for the rapid calculation that aligned this older face with the face they had known at 18.All night, people literally called out to one another in joy.“THIS guy!” a burly ex-football player said to me, his arm tight around David’s neck. “THIS guy went in head-first every single time!”“You know what it was like being in class with Dave here?” another guy said to me ten minutes later. “He’d walk in to class seconds before the bell and find the rest of us frantically studying. ‘Is there a test today?’ he’d go. He hadn’t prepared! Then, what do you think? I’d get a 95 on the darn thing and HE’D get a 98!”In general, the expert remembers like these two carried the evening aloft, bringing people’s thoughts vividly back to the past. It took the woman who spearheaded this whole reunion effort to carry their thoughts back to the present, by arranging class gift of backpacks and bus passes for those current students at the school who could really use them.People danced plenty, though not as much as they had done at earlier reunions. They drank plenty too, but again not as much which one could plainly see when the swarms huddled at the bar slowly morphed into clusters gathered around the coffee and tea.Anyway, I myself had a super time at this reunion that wasn’t my reunion, and by evening’s end I saw how silly it is for any of us to ever worry about who will come talk to us, when it is entirely in our power, as members of the great old Class of 2015, to go up to anyone at all and get the conversation started our own selves.

For the Stranger I Danced With

Shortly before my reunion ten years back, I found myself strangely moved by the remarks sent in ahead of time by my high school classmates.Among them were a Restaurant Owner, and a Sheet Rock Installer, an Engineer and a Supervisor of Accounts Receivable. They wrote that they remembered hanging out after school, pulling the fire alarm senior year, skipping gym and smoking in the girls’ room.I wanted to go to that reunion but I had been shy in high school, and way too serious. Back then, I yearned to be accepted by those same ones who skipped gym to smoke in the girls' room. I was the kind of kid who faked sick in gym class so she could sit in the stands, doing the next night’s homework. By just about this time that year, I still wasn’t sure if I would go. David wouldn’t be coming, we agreed. He knew almost no one in the class and I knew my reunions were a torture to him.Then, about a week before the event, I ran into the only classmate who lives at all near me. She asked if I were going, then turned to her daughter.“Mrs. Marotta was a nerd in high school,” she said pleasantly to the child. That cinched it somehow. I’d go, all right. Plainly I had nothing to lose. I called up a couple of people and we made plans to meet there.It was sad to see who had not come. But the ones who had were fully there, and I found myself talking to people I had hardly known before. And I couldn’t help but note that there was none of the judgment or constant evaluation of earlier days, all of that having given way to something kinder.Back in high school, I was on the chubby side and had a short curly bob. I clanked with bracelets and swaddled myself in breath-squeezing cocoons of fabric.  But chubbiness ended for me when I turned 21. I grew my hair to shoulder length and have pretty much kept it there ever since.So the night of the reunion I wore a simple black dress and hoop earrings. Now I’m not saying I looked great. No doubt I looked better back then, even batter-dipped in baby-fat as I was. But I felt… freer somehow, less encumbered, on every level. We had all been watching the dancing, specifically the dancing of this one classmate who somebody said taught Ballroom Dance as a part-time job. Part way through the evening he came over and asked me to be his partner. “But I don’t know how to do the steps,” I stammered. “Just follow,” he answered, putting his hand on the small of my back.At first I kept looking down at his feet. Eventually, I took his advice and let him lead. I closed my eyes and felt… weightless.In the course of the evening, I think I danced with him three times.He thanked me all three times, bowed slightly and walked away. I never even caught his name. I found it out ten years later from the other people I worked with on the committee to plan our last reunion. His name was Tom, and he died shortly after that night. But as I think of him now, I think of what I learned from him that night, which as I look back, seems emblematic of our human journey: The way, nervous at first, we mount the stage of our emerging life.  The way, after a while, we learn to leave doubt and self-consciousness behind. Time does the rest, for it is Dance Master Time who holds us, really. We lean back. Maybe we close our eyes. It turns out we need only follow.

High School Reunion

my sister Nan, lucky David and I in 1974 (in the great age of tanning)

I went to see Ronaldo Friday in hopes that my super-curly hair might look at least a little normal for my big class reunion, which took place last night. But then mere hours out of the salon I was out moving a dining room set in the pouring rain and my hair just went crazy.With 98% humidity again yesterday I knew it wasn’t likely to look much different by reunion time no matter how much I blow-dried it; no matter how hard I squeezed it between the searing ceramic plates of the flatiron. It was curly back then; why would my classmates expect any different now?This picture above shows David in his John Denver stage flanked by my blond sister Nan and me, both of us in the kind of dress our cohort of women would wear to say a 5th reunion. (Halter tops were huge in the 70s.)Dressing for last night’s affair all these years later, I knew I wouldn’t go the plunging neckline route.Or the spike heel route (and really when did that ever seem a good idea for a woman?)Would I even wear a skirt, or would I panic-buy some kind of glitzy slacks-and-a-tunic-with-shoulder-pads getup like the Golden Girls?At 3pm I still didn’t know.When I went to David’s class reunion last spring I wore a warm autumn-brown ensemble and could hardly breathe inside its tourniquet of a bustier, so the Ace bandage around the thoracic region was out.In the end I was leaning toward my one good pair of slacks and a top handed down to me (handed up to me?) by one of my daughters, the more clothes-conscious one.Anyway I wasn't that worried. I knew that unless we all showed up looking like Crusty the Clown nobody was going to be paying that much attention, because the action is all on the inside by the time people get to be our age. Exterior things just don’t matter that much, and isn’t THAT a blessing and a relief. You know it is!