True to Your School
My 30-year reunion wasn't what I expected. In some ways it was entirely opposite of the high school experience I had gone to the Long Beach Hilton to celebrate, which in my particular case was satisfying, encouraging and about as optimistic a time in my life as I've ever had.
I realize that in itself is entirely opposite to the typical high school experience of many of my peers and for pretty much anybody who was oriented by the 60s and then lived its consequences through the 70s (I can't speak for the 80s and later, when the acquisitive, America-first Reagan era set in and high school dissolved completely as a touchstone for me). But I believed without a shred of irony that being a 17-year-old senior was the pinnacle of sophistication, that 1979 was what I'd been preparing for since kindergarten, and that my moment had come. Yes, the system was corrupt, society was unequal and the government was untrustworthy. But I was going to ride roughshod over all that--literally forge a new path-- with the talent and passion I had been cultivating in public schools for the last dozen years. The time was nigh. The world was my glittering disco ball, and it would know me. Things would change.
Et cetera, et cetera. One of the first things I realized at the reunion was how alone I was in my grandiose thinking (which, mercifully, I always kept to myself). The bash at the Long Beach Hilton saw plenty of conversation, but almost none of it was about taking the world by storm or falling short of dreams or assessing where people are now versus where they envisioned being 30 years ago. Instead, this lot of earlyish middle-aged people looked around eagerly for who was there and whether they recognized them. Who was alive? was the most pressing question of the evening, and the departed were represented by a single candle that burned on a small table on the dance floor throughout the night. We were instructed to bow our heads in a moment of remembrance for the Mohicans who had gone on to God (I cheated on that head bow, just like I'd cheated mostly every time we were called to do the pledge of allegiance during high school assemblies and the like. Who were we remembering, exactly? Allegiance to what?)
But back to the party--because that's what the reunion was. Not an adult party where people chat over wine and exchange business cards and war stories related to their line of work. That's not what the Stars of '79 (our class name) came to do. No, we came to illuminate the past for a night, to break away from all the war stories that accumulated too quickly after high school (jobs, marriage, kids, illness, divorce) and sink back into the blissful feeling of what it was like to only have to worry about cleaning out a locker or getting to practice on time. Or, in our most reckless moments, taking the world by storm.
People remembered me, which was surprising. Though Gardena was a happy experience, I was by no means popular or well-known or especially well-dressed. In a graduating class of 900, I lived in that big, comfortable netherworld between prom queen and outcast. I had odd but acceptable interests, like drama club. I sat in the back of many a room and doodled cartoons and logos on xerox paper. Yet people saw my face and lit up, becoming young and hopeful again as they remembered.
"Erin Aubry!" they cried. "You look the same! You haven't changed a bit!"
I smiled back with all the brilliance I could muster, and returned the hug of somebody I didn't know especially well in school, maybe not at all. That I meant something to that somebody now, maybe even then without ever knowing it, was a discovery worth making 30 years down the road.
