An aging high schooler looks back
The “I go to my reunion” essay is a staple of the genre. By now there is nothing new that can be said, but readers read them anyway, fearful that other people’s reunions were better than theirs. Which is a very high school reason. The most the reader can hope for from such an essay is the same old things being said well. I offer as an example our Fletcher Farrar’s rueful look back after 20 years titled “Who the heck are you?” (“I found the word ‘still’ used a lot in reference to me”) which appeared in our paper of Aug. 20-26, 1987.
Me, I write “I didn’t go to my reunion” essays. This weekend, some of my classmates from the Springfield High School Class of 1966 met to celebrate the 50th anniversary of our graduation. Or perhaps to celebrate ourselves for still being around to celebrate it. I’m not sure because I didn’t go. I was not very good at being a teenager, and want to relive those years about as much as I want to relive passing a kidney stone. I remember it as a time of confusion and embarrassment – yes, discovery too, but most of what I discovered was things that left me confused and embarrassed. Nor do I nurture hopes of rekindling old romances; all the girls I wanted were already sensible enough at 17 to realize that I was a catch that was better released. (Had I ever actually unhooked a girl’s bra, she would have found me as unprepared about what do next as George W. Bush after he’d invaded Iraq.)
The prospect that most appalled was of telling my life story over and over. Since I left SHS I’ve spent 40 years as a magazine journalist, in effect doing what I did then, which is sit in my room and write term papers on topics I don’t really care about, only instead of grades I get checks. It’s hard telling yourself that you did your best work at 13, but much harder telling other people, especially people with pensions.
I really identified with the pain professional killer Martin Blank described to his analyst when faced with going back for his 20th. You remember the scene. “They all have husbands and wives and children and houses and dogs, and, you know, they’ve all made themselves a part of something and they can talk about what they do. What am I gonna say? ‘I killed the president of Paraguay with a fork. How’ve you been?’” But at least the young Blank traveled a bit and met people.
The nostalgia for high school is odd in many ways. We were there under compulsion, after all, overseen by paid agents of the state whose jobs consisted mainly of inculcating habits of obedience to authority. (Learning? By all means, if possible, but order without learning if that was what order demanded.) True, it was a group bonding experience, but then so is being taken hostage.
What people seem to recall is not being in school but being adolescents in school. The schools make almost no concession for this crucial transition into adulthood; indeed high schools make it harder. A dear old friend who graduated from SHS in 1969 recalls that all day during school she was treated like a child, while the dentist who employed her as an assistant entrusted her each evening to close and secure his office with its wealth of drugs and equipment and cash.
People remember high school because it was a unique time in their lives, but that’s mostly because the American high school is a unique institution. In a talk he delivered at his 58th reunion, Will Howarth (SHS ’58) pointed this out. “Schools ranked children by age, not social status, and moved them through a curriculum, year by year, teaching them to share experiences as a single group,” he explained. “In that process the students became ‘a class,’ not defined by wealth but by training and by shared experience.”
The experience I remember sharing was at that time of life adolescents need the experience of the company of adults who are not their parents, adults who can act as role models, mentors and sages, adults they can test themselves against and learn from in order to begin to establish themselves in the adult world. For most of human history, that happened while working beside the grownups in the workshop or spinning at the hearth. Adolescents in our culture are crammed into buildings where the only adults they encounter are teachers acting in loco parentis. Since even substitute parents were the last adults most of us wanted to become, we just put off becoming adults at all.
I must disagree with Will, at least as his remarks apply to the high school cohort of 1966. Being segregated in this way more often meant that kids our age constituted our whole world, so naturally our problems come to seem to be the world’s problems. No wonder so many of us turned out to be aging narcissists, the sort of dreary bores who assume that people will want to read about why they didn’t go to their reunion because, well, Me.
Contact James Krohe Jr. at [email protected].
Editor’s note
Chuck Todd, the political director of NBC News and the moderator of “Meet the Press,” was informative and entertaining as he commented on the current political news for the Better Government Association’s annual banquet in Chicago this week. Hillary Clinton’s illness was less important for what it revealed about her health than it was as a reminder of her penchant for secrecy. “The Clintons are always their own worst enemies,” Todd said. Though Todd denied Trump gets more and better press coverage, he said Trump is more accessible than Clinton. As a consummate viewer of TV news, Trump even calls Todd once or twice a week to offer comments and suggestions. Todd, the master of mainstream media, could only wish others were as attentive. Family and friends, both liberals and conservatives, tell him they get their news on Facebook. –Fletcher Farrar, editor and publisher
