Fellow students, once just beginning adult lives, now have retired, or transition to the challenge of slower energy and newly-fashioned opportunities.
About 1000 students walked the stage that day in Long Beach, June 1964. The reunion gathered about 150. Where were they all? Suddenly I wished to know, though it's a bit late for that. But we're used to going on with missing pieces now, aren't we?
The memorial slide show, sad and final, showed me over 150 18-year old faces and names I hadn't concerned myself with for 50 years. We mark passings, and the room is quiet. In my mind, they were all merely older, not dead from cancer, Vietnam, heart attacks already.
My two best high school friends, Linda and Diane, were there, and I was glad to sit with them, a warm embrace and gentle smile shared between us. Linda's face still has its openness, and Diane's lovely smile lingers.
We have children, grandchildren, have lost our parents, and we are now solid and certain, grounded by the fact of our motherhood and old times, knowing that it will always be the same for us. We tell each other the truth.
Kids who'd been at best casual friends chatted each other up. I walked around checking out name tags, because I recognized almost no one. The polish of 50 years has given us new names, white hair, dyed hair, no hair, weight, limps, canes. We are not who we were. Do they see that? Do I remember them? Do they remember me? Yes and no, but that's okay.
It's like a field of poppies suddenly blooming across a swath of dry desert hillside.
We all had old boyfriends and girlfriends to find - a reunion ritual practice. "Mousie" and I "went steady" (I think) in 7th grade. We didn't talk again, even in high school, until 1970 on a plane flight from Danang to Guam. Joe Vernon was a Marine rotating out from his Vietnam combat year, and I was a flight attendant on that plane. There we were, astonished to recognize each other, our nation tangled in war and conflict.
Years later, seeing him living; he'd made it home and I was very glad. It was a celebration of the particularity of our lives, a memory path that finds our place in the history we lived.
Stan and I were friends and then began to go out on dates in our senior year. As graduation activities began, we moved on. His intelligence, attractiveness,and the experience of being known remained with me, like an heirloom charm, kept carefully put away.
A few years ago, a newspaper article I chanced to read while back East brought news of him. He and his partner were instrumental in securing gay rights legislation in Vermont, I read. I had to think for a time over this news but wasn't surprised to know of his accomplishments.
He was there. We laughed over the old songs the band played, and danced as I haven't danced in years, though Stan is practically ready for "Dancing with the Stars" while I might be voted most improved. I was touched that Stan remembered our friendship - he is vital at 68, charming, now poised and certain, too.
The tentativeness I sensed in him sometimes has become a communication space to enter and talk; he is a church deacon and therapist, most fitting, I declare.
The night drive home was congested, miles of Los Angeles' industrial yards finally leading past a skyline burning like far-away lanterns through dark heat. An evening I'd almost passed on had surprised me. I thought my quota was used up. I found myself smiling and laughing a bit, and then Yo Yo Ma playing Fauré's Elegy began to float from the radio. Perfect.
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