Reunions

When we were in California, I was lucky enough to go out to dinner with Pete, a fellow blogger and friend from high school. I hadn’t seen Pete since graduation way back in 19--, and I told him that hanging out with him constituted the only high school reunion I would be going to this year.

It happens to be one of those BIG reunion years for me. It’s not the first one, where everyone has transformed into cool, up-and-coming hipsters. It’s not the next one, where people come to brag about their new houses and cute little families and lucrative careers. The reunion in question is the one after that, where people try hard not to admit that they’ve morphed into the very parents they rebelled against all those decades ago.

I am not going to my reunion for many reasons, one of which is that my high school never threw a fun party. And true to form, there will be an alumni golf game and a luncheon, but no wild reunion bash. I can’t even begin to tell you how disappointing that is to me. If I’m forced to have a long conversation with John Q. Popular about what a sellout he is, I would prefer that there be a keg, some loud music, and dim lighting.

Another big reason why I’m not going to my reunion is that I haven’t been invited. Come to think of it, I haven’t been invited to any of the reunions. It’s kind of like I’ve been washed off the canvas of my adolescence. Apparently I was voted “Most Likely To Be Disowned By This Institution” at the end of my senior year. But honestly, that’s OK. Since I don’t have to spend time buying a new little black dress, I have a few extra minutes to contemplate the very idea of reunions and why they matter (or don’t).

I’ve always been a fan of reunion movies and books. Revenge is a big theme --- you know, where the ugly guy/girl comes back beautiful/rich/famous. And while I’d love to think that some of the under-appreciated members of my high school class are now fabulous and successful, that’s not the thing that truly interests me. I’m fascinated by the choices people make, even the small choices. Who stayed close to home (or who still lives in his parents’ basement?)? Who traveled far? Why did they leave? Who chose an interesting career? Whose career chose them? Did life turn out like they expected?

Over dinner, Pete claimed that I wouldn’t be very impressed by the stories I would hear at the reunion. I’d see lots of people doing regular things in regular ways. “But come on,” I told him. “Remember the group of boys who took a lot of steroids and spread chicken blood around the school our senior year? Aren’t you curious about what happened to them?”(This is true. It made the front page of the newspaper, in part because of the Boys Gone Wild nature of the stunt, and in part because the offenders got caught. Apparently there’s only one place to buy a live chicken in Detroit, and the chicken dealer identified the culprits). Pete figured that those boys probably stopped doing steroids long ago and are now medium-sized guys who work in a bank.

I suppose it would be disappointing to return to my childhood home only to find a beige and predictable group of people who hadn’t been transformed. But the more I think about it, my curiosity about the reunion has less to do with other people’s stories and more to do with my own. Did my life turn out like I expected? What did I expect, anyway?

I remember being at a graduation party when someone turned on Alphaville’s synth-pop ditty, “Forever Young.” A hush fell over the crowd as the singer crooned, “Forever young/I wanna be forever young…” It seemed so deep, that moment, sitting around with people we’d probably never see again, waving goodbye not just to friends but to childhood itself. And now, what strikes me even more than our incredibly bad taste in music is that feeling of being poised, of being ready to create something new. That’s the thing that gets lost in the churn of everyday living.

Last fall, Blue and Green attended a “preschool reunion,” which involved getting together with all the kids they hadn’t seen since, well, 4 months earlier. I will admit to you that I was excited about this event. How had the kids changed? Did little Skipper stop biting? Did Ken learn to wipe his nose? And Barbie, did she start to like math? The potential for transformation was there. But really, all the kids had more-or-less forgotten about each other as they began their new lives as kindergarteners. When the reunion ended, I asked the boys if it had been fun to revisit the long-ago days of preschool. “No,” Blue answered. “We are way beyond that.”

I, too, am way beyond those Alphaville days. But there’s a piece of me that would love to feel those clichés again, even for just a moment.

The More Things Change

The other night, in the midst of a deep sleep, I heard a whisper from above. “Mama,” the voice said. “Mama, wake up!” I opened one eye, and there was Blue, peering down at me with an intense gaze. “Mama, I can’t sleep,” he said.

“Huh,” I muttered.

“MAMA,” he said more firmly, with a hint of impending whine. “Did you hear me? I can’t sleep!”

Because I was so tired, I let him into our bed. That is always a mistake. Two seconds later, he was breathing heavily, his enormous head taking up the better part of my pillow. And I was the one who could no longer sleep.

I gathered some blankets and headed to the couch, already feeling the mounting anxiety about being tired and grumpy the next day. Once my brain engages, it’s hard to turn it off. And my thoughts often turn to all the things I haven’t done, and all the potential horrible events that could possibly happen, and how I wish that I had said X instead of Y to that guy in history class back in high school.

I tried to steady myself, to focus on something neutral. I decided to think about record albums. You see, my dad brought me a big bag of my old records that had been taking up space in his basement for the past 20 years. Strangely, the bag did not include any of the good ones I purchased back in the day; instead, it contained ones like this:




This Shaun Cassidy album is the first album I ever sought out myself. I wanted a Shaun Cassidy album because everyone else had one. In particular, Maureen O’Reilly, who was just a tad cooler than I was, told me that I had to get one. She had a poster of him that came with her Dynamite magazine, and she put it on her wall just high enough that she could tip her head back and kiss the image of his lips.

So I was pretty pleased with myself for acquiring this album, because it meant that I was entering the outer reaches of cool. But, to my dismay, this did not turn out to be the album that featured his hit cover of Da Do Ron Ron. It wasn’t cool after all, and neither was I.

When my dad brought in the bag of albums, Blue and Green asked, “What are those?” They had never seen a record and had no idea what the purpose of such a thing would be, especially since we don’t own a record player. To them, a record is just a black frisbee in a funny case.

This got me thinking about all the antique objects that linger on in my memory and in my language. I say “printer ribbon” instead of “cartridge.” I talk about leaving a message “on your machine” instead of on voicemail. I say “turn the channel” as if there’s still a knob on the TV that you have to twist.

Michael, too, has his retro moments. Right now, he has a message on his cellphone that cracks me up every time I hear it. He says, “I wasn’t able to make it to the phone, so please leave a message after the beep.” What, were you so busy playing Strat-O-Matic on the orange shag carpet that you couldn’t sprint to the kitchen to answer the wall-mounted phone? No, dude, you just have to reach down into your jeans pocket, so why is it so hard to “make it to the phone?”

The other day Polaroid announced that it was no longer going to manufacture its signature film. In a world where everything is already instant, who still needs to wait three minutes for their Polaroid picture to emerge from the photographic darkness? Apparently there was a mad rush on Polaroid film when this announcement was made. Lots of kooky folks were clamoring to extend the life of their now useless toy.

You all know that my garage is full to the brim with similar dinosaurs. There are car seats from 6 years ago --- obsolete! There’s my typewriter from college – obsolete! There’s a Sharp Wizard from the 1990s – obsolete! And there’s this:



This was the “stereo” that I brought with me to my freshman year of college. It was very cutting edge – a dual cassette player that could easily whip out mix tapes to suit my adolescent moods. My roommate and I agreed that we would share things – I could use her tiny refrigerator, and she could use my stereo. Of course, what that meant was that I had to hear her Erasure tape played on a continuous loop for an entire year. Over and over and over.

But you know, my freshman experience would have been so different if she and I had been plugged separately into our respective iPods. I would have experienced my academics differently if I could have emailed my professors my papers instead saving my drafts on enormous old floppy disks, taking the disks to the computer lab to print, and then running at breakneck speed to the departmental office by 5 pm to get them in on time. There were things – like going to the travel agent to buy plane tickets or waiting desperately by the dorm mailboxes for REAL LETTERS from faraway friends – that gave texture and shape to my life.

It’s so easy, now that I have kids, to talk about “the olden days.” You know, how I had to walk to school barefoot in the snow without any music to listen to because my Walkman was broken. The boys have already learned how to roll their eyes at those stories. Blue asked me the other day to tell him the year I was born. Then he said that if I were a ferry boat, I would be out of service. That’s me, out in the garage with the typewriter and the Polaroid camera. Obsolete!

Clutter

Now that the boys are launched into their new school year, I am left to evaluate my summer goals. Did I mention that I had goals? I bet you didn't think I was the goal-making type, but actually, I came up with three goals for the season. Goal number one was starting this blog. Check! Number two was turning something from my dissertation into a publishable article. Since this was unpleasant, I reassigned it to the fall. That leaves me with goal number three: cleaning the garage. To me, it is still summer (temperatures in the 80s, no obligations), so I think I need to get this done.

The thing is, the garage is the only storage place in our house. And let's just say that we haven't been very good at throwing things out over the last, oh, 10 years or so. When we moved from our apartment to the house, the boys were 14 months old and we couldn't be bothered with organizing. So we just shoved stuff into boxes, marked them "miscellaneous junk," and put them in the garage. Soon it became difficult to walk through the garage, so when something needed to go in there, we just heaved it onto the monstrous pile. Now it looks like one of those messes that gets a person flown to the Oprah show to have a heart-to-heart with Dr. Robin about hoarding.

I'm not a hoarder (really), but I am a collector. And this whole garage cleaning problem brings up some questions for me. When can the memory of a person/time/event stand on its own, without an object attached? Surprisingly, I'm pretty good at making this distinction with the kids' stuff. Those of you with children know that the amount of art work that a single individual can produce is staggering. At first, you might save every little scribble, but after a while the sheer volume of it becomes unbearable. You learn to say, "Oh, sweetie, ANOTHER abstract rendering of a circus. How lovely!" And then you chuck it. Now I just keep the most special things -- like the family portrait that Green produced last year, the one that had the caption, "Mommy is a better pitcher than Daddy."

It's a totally different story when it comes to stuff from my own childhood. When I was a kid, I collected wacky pack stickers, buttons, and Madame Alexander dolls. I clipped newspaper articles from the day MTV debuted and from the day the Challenger exploded. Did you ever write me a letter where you told me all about your first love? Well, I kept it (oooh, I smell some blackmail potential...). I saved stuff, lots of stuff. Here's an example. When I was 15, I had a crush on a boy, and I wrote about him all the time in my journal (oh yeah! Did I mention the journals? I have enough to fill a whole trunk). Here's a short excerpt:

I can’t tell if he likes me, and that bothers me a lot. I mean, he walks around with me, he talks to me, he says hi to me in the halls. But it seems to me that he does that to a lot of people…The best b’day present I could get would be if I got some miniature sign on Monday that he likes me!

Then Monday came, and I followed up with this:

I may have got my sign. I can’t really tell... I ate lunch with X today. Afterwards, he walked me to my locker. I opened it and was getting my books out, and he threw a candy bar in! I was thrilled beyond believable belief.

And here's the thing: I taped the candy bar wrapper into the journal. Because the object was so important to the event, I had to save it.

When I read this 22 years later, it looks like I have a piece of garbage in my diary. But back then, the wrapper held the promise of the moment, that a boy I liked might actually like me back. (So what do you think happened after this? It's a choose-your-ending romance story! Did this boy a) follow-up with a bouquet of roses; b) ask me to the Christmas dance; or c) ignore me? Take a guess.)

I like to reconnect with all these things, because I'm a historian at heart. I love archives, where you can go through folders and actually touch and feel old documents. Without those old papers, there's no history. Details get lost. People get lost. But at some point, the boxes get too full, the piles get too big, and decisions have to be made. What goes, and what stays?

Blue and Green have complicated the issue, because they, too, are collectors. They gravitate toward earthen things: sticks, twigs, rocks. Last weekend, we went to the beach, and the boys brought their buckets for gathering shells. At the end of the afternoon, Green brought over his bucket to show me his findings. Inside, there weren't rocks or shells. Instead, he had picked up countless pieces of the dead crabs that had washed up on the shore. And he wanted to bring them home. "No way," I said. "But mama," he whined, "It's for my collection!" "No," I said, holding firm. Candy wrappers from crushes, I get that. But dead crustacean parts? Forget it. Not in my garage.

Eleven

Does anyone remember this? It was one of the classier moments of our wedding. I recall that the professional photographer was up too close, trying to capture the romance of the cake-cutting. And I thought to myself, "Why do we need a picture of this? This is not particularly exciting." Then it occurred to me that my mother smushed cake on my dad's face at their reception, so hmmm.....I smeared a little on Michael, just to keep the tradition alive.

What's interesting about this photo is that it came two seconds too late. If it had been couple of beats earlier, you would have been able to see the RAGE in Michael's eyes. And if it had been just one second earlier, you would have seen him crush a huge piece of cake onto my face, and then more of it down into the front of my expensive silk dress.

So here's the thing about wedding dresses from the 1990s. They weren't those light sheath things that women are wearing these days. Dresses in the 1990s were heavy. Plus, the ladies at bridal shops impressed upon vulnerable brides the need for "appropriate foundational garments," so in the end it was like wearing two whole outfits on the big day.

When Michael did his cake trick, he managed to wedge the cake underneath the fancy foundational garment, making it impossible for me to get it out without stripping off the whole ensemble in the hotel bathroom. So I didn't. The rest of the evening, I had to feel the squish, squish of buttercream every time I moved. The first dance? Squish! Throwing the bouquet? Squish! The Big Exit down the stairs to the getaway car? Squish!

Ah, love. I don't think our wedding was the first time that Michael realized that I can be really annoying, and I've certainly taken annoying to new levels since then. Who controls the clicker in our house? Me! That has meant that Michael has watched a lot of Celebrity Fit Club this summer (Come on, Marcia Brady was on it! That's hilarious!). Who won't go see any movies with violence, gore, or death-by-serious-illness storylines? Me! That's a lot of WhenHarryMetSally-esque films for the poor man. Who gets crazy cravings around 11 pm? Me! Our household conversation goes like this:

Me: I want french fries.
Michael: Now?
Me: I can't stop thinking about them.
Michael: (sigh) Do you want me to go get you some?
Me: No. It would be really bad of me to eat french fries this late.
Me: But I'm really hungry.
Michael: I'll go get you some.
Me: No! I'm not asking you to do anything. I'm just sharing my feelings with you.
Me: But I'm afraid I won't be able to sleep.
Michael: I'm going to get some.
Me: Can you find an organic kind?

But really, we've had so many good times, too. There was that week on the Redneck Riviera, when no one else was there. It was like we owned our own little piece of Alabama -- eating out at Bubba's and then drinking gin and tonics on our white sandy beach! Or how about that backroads trip across Spain, where we went looking for ruins (and skulls! So many skulls! We found one building that was made out of 1,245 of them). And then there was the day that we found out about Blue and Green, when we shared that combination of exhilaration and panic (Michael got pulled over leaving the doctor's office, and he showed the ultrasound pictures to the cop! No ticket that day.).

So Michael, we've known each other a long time. I remember when you wanted to be like the guy in the Strawberry Statement, and I remember when you grew your hair long so you could wear a ponytail. Today, even though you like to play fantasy baseball just a little too much, I still think you're the coolest cat around. Happy eleventh anniversary (tomorrow)!