Editorial 11.7, July 2009, by Deirdre Helfferich High School Reunion Amazingly, I had fun. It was my thirtieth high school reunion, and the first one I had attended. I recognized very few people, although they, unnervingly, seemed to know me right away. It was especially awkward when they tried to jog my memory, and I looked at the old photos in our yearbook and still didn’t remember them, or only vaguely. I suppose it was typical of high school reunions: lots of catching up (with edits), lots of surprised exclamations at identities revealed, the occasional somber moment when news of a former classmate’s suicide or death by mishap or disease was conveyed, the pleasure at hearing of an old friend who had done well. I’ve spent thirty years being glad I would never have to go through adolescence and high school ever again. Bleah. But meeting the people who went through that agonizing age with me, and seeing, as one friend put it, that they’d learned to be comfortable in themselves at last, helped some of the ickiness slough away. I started enjoying myself, talking with people and looking at the yearbooks. I have all four of my yearbooks, but I haven’t looked at them in at least ten years. There in the sun on the lawn of the Chena Pump House, with a lot of forty-eight and forty-nine-year-olds around me, it was pretty amazing to see our younger selves. There was a photo of me with the group of students who had founded the school’s first literary magazine, the Mind’s Eye, to which I had contributed and was an editor. We did paste-up! There was even a photo of the poster I made calling for submissions. (Obviously, my future career was clear even then, although it took me another fifteen years to get to it.) A few of the teachers were there, too, and it was great to see them. One of them told me a tale of my father flashing a party while wearing a bear hide and a horned helmet. I didn’t hear about THAT one while I was growing up! One person told me her brother remembered me vividly because I arrived at the senior prom with a bunch of bikers. She wasn’t sure she believed him. I remembered my senior prom, and my date—but I can’t remember how I got to and from the dance. It was peculiar, trying to remember an event that was excruciatingly important to me then, and not having a clue, really, if this was true. It would have been bold of me, certainly. I was quite comfortable with being a passenger on my dad’s BMW, although I hadn’t mastered driving a motorcycle. Would I have shown up in leather-clad company on loud wheeled machines? Um. Maybe? I opted for probably not. But the thing is, I don’t know. West Valley Senior High was a great school—we were all very proud of it then, because it was new, and ours. We had been West Lathrop students, and I at least had the sense that we were merely borrowing Lathrop’s premises, and we weren’t exactly welcome (Lathrop High had been double-shifting in those days, during the pipeline boom). Still, I remember how I felt then, like an embarrassed wallflower. But feelings are unreliable—it’s a cloud inside, full of the immediate and the old rehearsed, revisited attitudes and emotions that cling to memories until the memory is obscured but the emotion remains. The internal perspective and the external perspective on our past selves can be so different. At the reunion, it all seemed very unimportant. It quickly became just another social occasion, a pleasant one, but with the added benefit that most of the people there—while strangers to me—were not complete strangers, and so conversation was fairly easy. We all had something to talk about, to ease the party into garrulous conviviality. One of the funnier aspects of the reunion was the sidelong glances everyone gave each other, trying to guess who that familiar face was. The name tags did not show up for at least the first hour, so we didn’t quite know who was who (or at least, I didn’t). One fellow I kept seeing and thinking to myself, “man, he looks familiar.” I finally gave up and went over to ask who he was. It turns out he’d never attended West Valley, but he’s married to one of my classmates, runs Big Ray’s, and is in a local band, RPM. We started talking about music and ukeleles and George Harrison, and I found that I was comfortable with myself, and with the people around me, both past and present. I’d like to think that I showed up to my prom on a motorcycle, high-school-senior-coolness incarnate, but you know what? It doesn’t matter if I did or didn’t. Today I went and played my ukelele at the Calypso Farm open house with one of the other Banana Girls, and we butchered a few songs and had a lot of fun and we were coolness incarnate. Or silliness incarnate maybe. It’s the same thing, after all. It just took me a while to figure that out.
| ||
 | | |
