Reflections of the Way Life Used to Be

“And now the journey is over, too short, alas too short.  It was filled with adventure and wisdom, laughter and love, gallantry and grace.” 
                                                                                Maurice Tempelsman
                                                                                (My Senior Quote)

Even though I never lettered - much
less played - in a sport, I had a
varsity jacket

Last night Friday night was my 15 year high school reunion.  I didn’t go.  Mainly because it was in the city and I would’ve had to take a train and there isn’t much that I hate more than taking the train into the city.  Oh, and I really didn’t want to go.  Most likely, there would’ve been mingling (at which I am so stellar).  Then after the rousing rendition of “Reunited [and it feels so good]” and the initial pleasantries, I probably would’ve sat in the corner awkwardly examining the train schedule to figure out the next train back to suburbia.     

It’s not that I don’t look back on high school with fondness.  I do.  Well, not “my high school was exactly like Degrassi and I’d go back in a second” fondness but more of “it was fun to have a locker” kinda fondness.  High school wasn’t the best time of my life but it wasn’t the worst time of my life either (for the record – that was roughly 2001 to 2003).  I wasn’t a popular girl, a bad girl, or even a mean girl.  I wasn’t a freak and I wasn’t a geek.  I wasn’t even a misfit or an outsider…although in high school don’t we all feel like misfits and outsiders?

Does anyone know what
an El Delator actually is?

I was solidly middle of the road in high school.  I wasn’ t super smart but I wasn’t dumb even though I never quite got the hang of algebra.  While I got along with most of my classmates, I had a small group of friends that I hung out with – in the cafeteria, during free periods, and under the Friday night football lights.  I endured bullying although I never considered it that; choosing instead to walk down different hallways so I could avoid the upperclassmen offenders.  I was in the girl’s locker room after gym when I found out that Kurt Cobain died.  I never cheated, got a detention, or had to visit the school disciplinarian.  I didn’t cut on Senior Cut Day.  I was sitting in math class (Pre-Calc) when O. J. Simpson was acquitted because the glove did not fit.  I hated every school picture ever taken of me.   I was in the audience when Hillary Clinton came to speak at my school.  I made the honor roll for most of my academic career and received the History Department’s Excellence Award in senior year.  I wasn’t on any sport teams and the only extracurricular club that I was involved in was Students for Environmental Action (SEA) and that was only as a favor to a friend.  I went to all the Homecoming dances but skipped the Prom.   I never had perfect attendance.   
 
All in all, I was a typical high school student. 

I think it took me almost 15 years to realize that.    

Cheers to the Class of 1997.  Maybe I’ll make it to our 20 year reunion.

But only if it’s in the suburbs. 

Ripples

I have that screen-saver thing on my phone that when you press it, it ripples out from the center of where you pressed, strong at first then weakening before the screen returns to normal.  As I fiddled around with it today after my nap, I got to thinking about the events in our lives that set off ripples that are felt in the days, months, years that follow.  Strong at first, those ripples weaken over time…but unlike my phone, life doesn’t ever really return to normal.  All you’re left with are tiny ripples and wonderings of what if? 

A lifetime ago - my brother’s, actually - a little over 35 years ago, one of those events happened in my family.  I don’t need to rehash the past so I won’t…but something happened and someone disappeared from the fabric of our family.  But people don’t really ever disappear…their importance, their significance lingers on…even if it’s only a memory, faded though it may be.

I don’t know if it was my passion for history or my constant search to find my place in a family in which I didn’t see myself in anyone else…but I’ve always felt a connection to this person whom I only knew from photographs and old family stories.  This man – whose name I have heard hundreds of times in my life from the mouths of cousins who remember him…who knew him – this good man raised my mother from the age of 11 until he walked her down the aisle.  I was born six years after that but by then…by then, everything was just a ripple. 

Half of my lifetime ago, when I was 16, I used that newfangled Internet technology thingie to find him.  I knew his name after all…even if I couldn’t spell his last name quite right.  Eventually, in my high school computer lab, I found his address on the World Wide Web.  And I wrote him a long, rambling letter.  And then I waited.  [Note – hormonal teenage girls should never try to write heartfelt letters to long-lost relatives.  I can’t remember exactly what I wrote but I’m pretty sure it didn’t make a lot of sense.  Actually, I could’ve been mistaken for a crackpot.]

One day there was an envelope addressed to me in our mailbox.  I opened it to find a note with a single sentence on it.  The past must stay in the past.  I was stunned…and scared.  I tore that note up into a million tiny pieces and threw it away.  And I never told anyone about what I had done.  The past would stay in the past.  But a couple of years later, while my mother and I were in the car and she started talking about trying to find him, my secret, the only secret I have ever kept from my mother, came out in choking sobs.  I had ruined her chance to find him…to connect with him again after so many years.  I told her about the note; she asked if I had saved it.  I told her no.  And she was quiet.  And oh how I wished I hadn’t torn up that note.  I wished I had saved it so I could give it to her.  So, she could have one last piece of him.  The past was in the past but the ripples were still rippling.

Around Christmas, three years ago – by now, I was living in Maryland – I got a phone call from my mother.  Her voice was…different.  Excited, nervous, surprised?  I didn’t know what it was but I knew something was up.  She told me…you got a card from him.  And my heart leapt.  And so we corresponded occasionally.  He has written to me about his childhood in Germany and his dreams of America as a boy and his own love of history.  But we don’t write of the past – that past.  But it’s there…rippling. 

I long to ask him all sorts of questions.  Questions about my mother before she became my mother.  What was she like as a little girl?  Does he remember the trip to the Indian reservation?  What did he really think about her following baseball players across the country?  Does he remember the blue jumpsuit he made for her?  What was he thinking as he walked her down the aisle?  Could he have possibly imagined how strong she would become?  Does he think about her?  Or is she just a lingering memory…a ripple in his own life?

When my inbox pings and I see that I’ve received an email from him, my heart leaps.  It is a little piece of the past that I wonder about and ask myself what if?  But the past is the past and we cannot change all that has happened even as it ripples still.     

But I wish I could tell him - oh, how you are missed.  And loved.