Memory Alley

My 40th high school reunion is coming up now that it’s 2012, so go on and figure out what year I graduated. You didn’t know there’d be math involved, did you? So far I’ve attended every reunion my exalted reunion committee has organized, although if truth be told they didn’t all happen the exact year they were supposed to. Which is fine because the dates being fungible fits right into the dazed and confused aura of going to high school in the seventies. Maybe our 20th was really our 22nd and maybe one didn’t happen at all. I seem to recall attending three reunions and each time I walked into wherever they were held the memorial table with pictures of classmates no longer with us was a little longer. I’m preparing myself for this next display to stretch out like a bowling alley. There’s nothing sadder than seeing the Homecoming Queen’s face look out at you from behind a piece of glass propped up on a tablecloth labeled In Memoriam. Except, of course, being the Homecoming Queen.

Reunions these days are usually organized on Facebook or Classmates, which I believe was recently renamed Memory Lane. Maybe not even recently since I haven’t visited their page in like a year. They wore me out with their incessant Guess Who Wants to Get In Touch With You, OSV? emails and finally one bad day I said out loud I Don’t Give A Shit and canceled my membership and hoarded that $5 a month fee somewhere I’ll never find it. What Groucho once said turns out to be true: I don’t want to belong to any group that would have me for a member. What is even more true is that nothing is ever canceled online. Yesterday I went onto the site for the first time in a dozen months and was greeted with WELCOME BACK, OSV! Mind you, I didn’t enter a password or login name or anything. It was genuinely creepy.

The reason I went on was to check if the 40th reunion was still scheduled for September of 2012. I RSVP’d back in 2010 with a decisive Yes and the hopeful comment How nice if this really happens. I meant it optimistically, but I discovered my words might also be taken as sarcasm, as evidenced by another person’s comment. In the many months that transpired between my visits, quite a few classmates responded. I read down the list of names and recalled snippets of information regarding each of my former fellow students. Things like how this one was such a good artist, and that one an amazing athlete, and this one was an asshole, and that one I had no recollection of whatsoever. Several left comments about wanting to see everyone again and so forth. One or two gave regrets with way more information about why they couldn’t attend than anyone could ever be interested in. Then I got to the name of the guy who’s organizing the reunion and he left this comment a few days after I left mine back in 2010: Those individuals who display negative attitudes to this event in public shall be penalized by the planning group. So while you shall remain nameless but have the initials of One Sane Voice, beware.

WHAT?! I couldn’t believe I’d been called out over a year ago with my full name in front of the whole class and was oblivious all this time. Which come to think of it is also about right for attending high school in the seventies. Going through the thousand emotions high school memories wreak, I sat in my reclining desk chair and stared at the computer screen. I felt like I was wearing that puffy white gymsuit with the elastic leg bands that cut off your entire blood supply below the thighs. How mortifying. And now I only have nine months to plan my revenge.

Daughter’s Featured Fotos are all over the map and double the usual dose