So that is who I was...when we all wrote "Good luck in the future" in each other's yearbooks, not having much of an idea of how we would deal with life nor how life would deal with us.
We had our reunion this June, 50 years after we graduated. Of the 100 kids we could find, about 50 or 60 attended. We had had a few earlier reunions so had kept in touch to some extent...still the years do show. And the different roads we travelled down...or did the roads take us? The classmate now living in senior housing, the one with a manse in Florida, the one with 18 grandchildren, the ones with none, the ones who have struggled with drugs or cancer, the ones for whom life has been easy, the marriages and divorces, the lost loves....all in one room for a few hours.
Even the ones who did not come because they did not want to remember or their remembrances were painful or they had passed on, they were there. For we are our shared memories...and they are present in those stories of the past that we share.
Like sitting around the high school yearbook room...deciding upon a name for it (we went with "Prelude"...this year's yearbook has the same name...a shared memory except now the memory has become a tradition)...or discussing layout..Sue, me (always known as "werge"....did anyone know I had a first name?), Iris, Carol, and Leslie. This being together, laughing, for others playing sports or playing hooked,....ties we shared and share.
But we go back much further. We spent much time at the reunion identifying ourselves in our 1958 grammar school photo...we got about 80 percent. And our memories extended back not only to us, but to our brothers, sisters, cousins, moms, dads. And how many outside of older members of our families remember my Mom, my Dad? What a deep, quiet joy to be with these neighborhood friends who know me in the context of my childhood, my early youth.
But the past is only a prelude, no? On Sunday after the reunion and then a reunion party, we met in North Bergen for brunch, then took the ferry over to Manhattan to catch some part of the Gay Pride parade. Gail, Sheila, Sue, and Werge. Still living life forward...as far as it will go.
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Location:North Bergen, NJ
