YEARBOOK CONFESSIONS

There was the night when my daughters – at the time, one in college, the other beginning high school – had been chattering about something that prompted me to get out the yearbooks. Show them what things had been like back then, when Bob Dylan was just going electrified, Vietnam was ramping up, and hippies, well, were still more than a year away in the future. (My wife insists this came up on my birthday.)

Their reactions weren’t quite what I expected. Yes, there was the giggling, especially over the girls’ flip-style hair and A-line dresses. And their dismissal of some beauties I’d lusted after, as well as their agreement on others. Initially, they couldn’t find me in the pictures, and then, when they did, they started laughing: “You’re everywhere! Is there a group where you weren’t an officer? Hey, he even has some poetry here!” As well as my wife’s, “My, you were cute back then.” Which pains, in a way: I’m not now? Of course, I was the skinny, clueless intellectual back then – and generally unloved. To my further surprise, my girls declared that the boys in my high school class were generally pretty attractive – “They look put together,” as they put it – compared to those today. Maybe it was all the ties and shorn heads. I thought we looked pretty dorky. Still do, looking back.

A bit later, one night at the office, as one of my coworkers was complaining to another about the latest machinations by her son’s teacher, and his high school’s draconian response, I remembered that I’d been having a fleeting sense that this would have been the year for my 40th reunion – that is, if anyone was still in charge. With all of my moves about the country, though, they’d long since lost track of me. I’d never made any of the reunions anyway, either being unemployed at the time (and thus short of cash), unable to get the vacation time off or budget for the air fare, or even learning of the last one a couple of months after it happened. Lately, though, there have been some tentative Web searches for individuals, which did lead to a posting of some items from The Hilltopper, from when I was editor-in-chief. So now, around midnight, I decided to Google, just in case, a reunion notice might be posted, somewhere. And lo and behold, there it was. The Victory Bell, and then photos from their 35th anniversary gathering.

The Web site itself wasn’t in the best shape. A bit of nosing about did turn up a notice that there would, indeed, be a 40th observance, though because “we’re especially short of funds,” no mailings would be sent out. (As if they had my address.) But do I want to spend an evening in an American Legion hall with a DJ and people trying to make happy? The idea gives me the creeps. I’m a country dance kind of guy, or would at least prefer a setting where conversation would be facilitated, rather than masked.

Still, something in my awareness was pierced, and the emotions could not be restrained. For 40 years, from my perspective, at least, these classmates have been frozen in time. Their supple flesh and worldly inexperience, preserved intact. Jarring, then, comes the notice on the site, informing of the death of one who had been incredibly desirable, with side-by-side photos of her at 18 and then aged. As are notices of a cluster of others, now deceased. I click again, to photos from the 35th reunion, and am appalled. I recognize no one. They’re loud, badly dressed, and have not aged well. Finally, I find a few photos with the people identified, and then admit some are actually in pretty good shape. Another icon leads to a listing that includes married surnames, and the trail of these classmates is no longer lost from my sight. Further Web searches, for instance, present one I’d idealized who is now spouting political drivel, while another – once the epitome of cool sexuality and now apparently divorced in the past five years – is teaching knitting or quilting in a fundamentalist church. I return to the class Web site. Wonder about the Adonis club males, and just how did so many become so grotesque? As for the dress, strange tans, paunches, and wrinkles, the gray or dyed hair, or lack thereof: this is what I thought I wanted to return to, after college. Here, I must confront the reality that some – essentially the reunion crowd – were able to stay in town, largely on the one side of town, at that – while some others have been scattered to the winds. After all, I am among those “location unknown.”

How could I possibly begin to relate to them all of the twists in my own life – the ashram experience, the orchards and mountains of the Pacific Northwest, the St. Helens eruption, my Quaker progression and return east, publication of experimental novels and countless poems, the divorce and finally coming to have children when many of them are enjoying grandchildren, to say nothing of having a wife who’s nearly the age of their own children?

I looked at the posted photos and wondered, who are all these old people? Wondered, too, how I ever escaped that circle. (Oh, vanity!)