20 Year High School Reunion

Sweetie and I spent the weekend looking back at old times with about one or two hundred of the people we graduated from high school with. Twenty years can go by pretty fast when your not looking, and though I thought I was, I can honestly tell you I must have had my head in a book or something. As to how many pages that is that fills up twenty years of time, or how many episodes of Seinfeld one must have watched, well now that’s hard to say. I have a theory that time doesn’t seem all that fast in the present because this is the closest moment it comes to being stationary. Time’s movement isn’t constant like one would think; it accelerates the further it gets from the now.

Down on the waterfront, past where the Top Of The Ocean used to sit, past the Harbor Lights and the fire station, lies most of the new construction from the past twenty years of Commencement bay. The dusty costume necklace that was the old Tacoma waterfront has been spun and recast to catch the eyes of a new generation. There is very little here that is truly old anymore.

We spent the night talking to people the way one talks to distant relatives at a family reunion. Cautiously making connections between this person, and that person. Connecting wires of memories unplugged for years and now glowing like an ancient light bulb over our heads. Bringing up questions like “Weren’t you…?” and “Didn’t you used to date…?”

Sweetie and I have it relatively easy really. She, because of her amazing memory and me because I’m married to her and that amazing memory. She remembers names and events of people and places that are so distant to me it’s as if they never even happened. Or if they happened at all, it was in a previous life; a life I moved though like a zombie. A life I watched un-participated in.

Some people are the same, a few have changed completely, and some have changed in exactly the way you knew they would. Like by looking at their eighteen year old faces twenty years ago you could see their life all mapped out in front of them and all they had to do was keep the car steered between the dotted lines.

For the most part everyone was nice and sincere. The gaggle of cheerleaders still stood off to the side in their too tight dresses and overdone hair, just as they did at the senior prom and just as they’ll do at the fiftieth reunion; checking off names to dismiss like the elephant herd in Dumbo come to life. But they were the exception and not the rule.

I think for the most part people just wanted to know that they mattered enough for you to remember them. That before anyone’s life really got going, before one could vote, when the world was carved in black and white, right and wrong, truth and lies; that we all mattered enough in each others lives to make at least one lasting memory.

In all, there were more people there I remembered than people I forgot. More stories I’d forgotten, than remembered. Less looking back, than looking at now. And truly more fun than I would have expected.