Reunited, and it feels so right
Published: December 12, 2006
I spent the day of my 50th Overbrook High School reunion studying myself in the mirror, changing from one outfit to the next and, rearranging the hair I’d spent a fortune to have done.
Two hours before it was time to leave for the reunion in Philadelphia, I rushed into the shower to wash my hair and start all over again.
Reunions do weird things to people.
As it turned out, I had a wonderful time. A spectacular time.
I exhaled after the first 30 seconds at the Bala Golf Club, a place I’d never once entered before, and let the feelings come. They did.
Early in the evening, I hugged brilliant Mark, my biology lab partner and the guy who got me through the course, trying to tell him all these years later how grateful I was to him.
I wept when I saw Sharon, the elementary school pal with whom I’d traveled through junior high, then high school. I wept because she’d survived a heart attack years before, and I’d never reconnected with her. Guilt makes me cry.
On a night that felt real and surreal, I looked back to 1956 when we believed the world was a good place and we would be young and healthy forever. How wrong we were.
Fifty years later, so many faces were missing from the party, so many names were tolled in a suddenly silent room as we paused to remember those classmates, forever young to us, who didn’t make this milestone.
Not beautiful Carol, the foxiest girl in class, a casualty of breast cancer. Not perky Debbie, dead of the same disease in her late 30s. Not Anthony and Bob and all those others we thought were invincible at 17.
Those moments passed, and the music played as 60-somethings danced the jitterbug and attempted the twist. In between, there were conversations that ranged from the mundane to the searching.
Three of our classmates had lost children recently. Unfathomable, that loss.
Several had accomplished significant things in science and medicine and business. We were, in our late 60s, actors and writers and dentists and clerks and secretaries, and many of us, retired.
That R word still gives me pause, and so far does not apply to me. But there it was, front and center, among the kids who once cheered for the same basketball team and dreamed of becoming famous like Wilt Chamberlain, the guy we called Dippy, and the most celebrated upperclassman at Overbrook when we entered in 1952.
And now Dippy, too, was gone.
We remembered, of course, the sweet simplicity of the ’50s. But we also recognized that the decade was a rigid, uptight blip on America’s time line, when our twin gods were caution and conformity, and a demagogue named Joe McCarthy polluted the nation’s landscape with his toxic accusations.
They had called us the Silent Generation. We were not only silent, we were tense and troubled and afraid.
But oh, the quaintness of life back then for nice girls like me. Success was so clearly defined: You caught a good man, moved to the split-level suburbs and lived happily ever after, just as in those Doris Day movies.
So we wore our pullover sweaters and straight skirts with kick pleats, forced our hair into a sweet style called a pageboy fluff, and never even thought of dropping out.
But our connection, our communion, our shared ideals were real, and were still felt 50 years later. Maybe that’s because high school is so pivotal a time that it lives in the marrow. Good, bad or indifferent, it demands attention, even decades later.
As the evening wore down, we hugged with a certain ferocity, made pledges to be in touch, and to use the wondrous Internet to stay close. It may even happen in a few instances.
But come what may, we still will have memories of this one magical night when we remembered the way we were - and celebrated being young together once.
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