Last night, I got a package in the mail that was about 40 years in the making. It was a thin cardboard envelope from Walgreens promoting “quality photos" on the outside. It came from a Mosinee address. So as I dropped my weekend and work bags and sat down sweating from the heat of a gorgeous but humid summer day, I ripped it open to discover my past, my present and maybe even my future.
Two weekends ago, my graduating class, the Class of 1982 had a “25 plus 1" reunion. It had been planned for the past year or so and I went through the typical stages that anyone who goes to high school experiences when confronted with the opportunity to reconnect with people they grew up with.
The first stage was excitement. As I'd been exploring my past since last summer on this blog and in the scanning of countless photos back from growing up for the Chronology pages of this site, I wondered what had become of the 179 people that I grew up and graduated high school with. I became a magnet of sorts and suddenly a variety of friends and acquaintances dropped into my life from that time and I got some of my answers. This one lived in Florida, that one stayed in Mosinee, this one drove trucks and this one was starting a new business.
But as the new year arrived, I found myself confronting old scars of the past. Did I really want to schlep myself and the BF all the way to Mosinee? The excitement gave way to stage two: fear. I'd been bullied quite a bit over the years and had never quite fit in with my own class being an artsy fag nerd type. Oh, I had a few friends my age but I mostly escaped the horrors of daily living by paling up with others younger or older than me with similar interests and diving head first into the choir, the band and plays. Naturally, that which saved me also gave others more ammunition with which to pick on me.
So it was with some fear that I approached the reunion; not really that I was going to be at the mercy of that same foulness (one would hope that everyone would have grown up) but that I wouldn't have led a life that would measure up to my own expectations from that time. To escape, I had to dream big and in some very real ways I had to claw my way out of there but I haven't exactly landed on a marquee somewhere. So the question arose inside my head, what would I say that I have done with my life?
The third stage arrived unexpectedly as I fretted about all of this. A work thing I had to be here in New York for that same weekend made the trip to Mosinee impossible. I found myself unable to go and unexpectedly disappointed.
You see, I grew up with these people. We went to kindergarten together and maneuvered growing up together and whether or not we really spent much time together outside of class or not, we led our lives together. We had fights, romances, inside jokes and common enemies. But by the time senior year arrived, I at least was ready to find out what I was going to do next.
Maybe it's a touch of craziness disguised as hope that allowed me to fantasize that going to a class reunion wouldn't be more than a lot of stress and anxiety, trying to prove that the scars of the past weren't with me still. But who would I be trying to prove that to, them, or me?
In the years since, I kept Mosinee and those years at a safe distance as best as I could. When, five and a half years later, I heard from my mother that there had been a five year reunion that she had neglected to forward the invite for, I was strangely unmoved. Then, in 1992, I got a call from my long time friend Kristin asking if I was going to the ten year I vaguely reluctantly explained that I was on the road heading to a theatre conference in Seattle.
I was sort of disappointed but quickly forgot about it.
So last night, another 16 years later, when I saw that the picture of my classmates had arrived in the mail, I had great fun trying to see who was there but, sadly, I couldn't identify who was who for the most part. I can name virtually everyone in the kindergarten class picture that I still have but, after 26 years, I find it difficult to figure out who was who now.
And maybe that's a good thing.
Maybe I've let go of that hurt more than I thought I had and maybe all I was holding on to was some vague fear that doesn’t have anything to do with who they are, or, even more importantly, who they are now.
(I do have to say, as an aside, that it was a nice extra bonus to see two of my high school crushes there, looking mighty fine. To save them and me embarrassment, I'll l decline to name them but you shouldn't assume that both of them were male because they weren't).
But in any event, I could see myself making the trip for the 30th just for the fun of it and I guess if that's not progress, I don't know what is.
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