This event had been on my mind for months if not years. I was embarrassed by my own inner dialogue. It seemed so petty that in my head I was justifying myself and explaining how successful I really was instead of the way I thought I might appear to them.
From the very start it turned out to be an exercise in maintaining my self esteem while keeping my ego in check. What I learned at my high school 50th reunion was that my classmates, mostly people I barely knew in high school, were really nice people. As a group John Doherty observed we were men of substance, respectable members of our community. As I met people I was struck over and over again what good guys they were. And their wives were nice too.
There was only one classmate from my circle of friends there. Seeing Bob again was a real pleasure. The last time I saw him he was getting ready to ship out to Vietnam as a Navy medic. The best part of seeing him was to celebrate that he had survived. One of our classmates was badly wounded in Vietnam, shortly after arriving there as I understand it. He was in long recovery that started touch and go. He was the war hero that everyone seemed to be particularly aware of. I guess John was the sacrificial lamb for people and they had to express their admiration and awe for his sacrifice and certainly gratitude for his recovery.
As a veteran, I didn't have to go to Vietnam, I admired John for
going and I'm sure his recovery required courage and heart. John
like many others was wounded in the first few weeks in Vietnam probably before
he learned to duck.
(After writing this I learned John had been a medic in Vietnam. Anybody who was a medic in my world automatically is a hero. Sometimes it doesn't pay to write honestly how I feel, particularly when I'm wrong.)
No one seemed to notice Bob the way they did John. If anyone was a war hero I thought it was Bob. On direct questioning he admitted he had been a medic with the Special Forces and jumped out of a few helicopters. I'm sure he saved many lives and saw many young men die. No one seemed to be aware of that except me. Today Bob is a heart surgeon. I sat next to him for a few minutes and we exchanged information. Bob talked on about things I didn't have much interest in. We don't really have much in common any more, but sitting next to him I had a real feeling of affection and joy in his presence, just to see him and I could feel the same from him. Without thinking about it we patted each other on the arm a few times. We were there together. The words didn't matter.
When I was in high school I thought I was one of the bright kids and a lot of the others were kind of dumb. Since then I've learned that some of the others became doctors, veterinarians, county administrators, financiers, lawyers, newspaper reporters, bartenders, artists and stock brokers. For me my own career pales when I compare it. I was smart. I'm still smart, but not smart enough to have earned much money or prestige. I remind myself I never really worked very hard to earn money. Of course, I'm selling two successful careers short, but when I started comparing myself to my classmates,
My struggle was to be mindful that we had all done well including me while at the same time trying to resist telling stories that made my own experience sound like more than it really was. Most of us were pretty interesting when we got to talking about the things we loved. Many of us had kids and had been good parents, most of us were grandparents and proud and excited about the offspring of our offspring.
One of my classmates was a doctor, who was living and practicing in the same town he had gone to after residency. He said he was married to a wonderful wife and had wonderful children and as we exchanged stories, we hadn't really been friends in high school, he said something about being envious of the excitement in my life. I've been a banker, a juvenile hall counselor and a Park Ranger. His admiration surprised me when it was his life I was envying, his stability and solid accomplishments.
I heard one of our classmates had been in auto accident as an undergraduate at USC and suffered severe brain damage in the frontal lobe and while still alive was badly debilitated. Steve had been a bright guy, he was good looking kid and though he hadn't found himself in high school, I'm pretty sure he would have been successful in life but for the accident. No one else said anything about Steve. Maybe it wasn't true. Maybe I got it wrong. I hope so.
With another classmate I speculated that probably 10 of our classmates had passed on, ten out of 95. One of them had been my closest friend in high school. He died in 2011 of a heart attack a year after my own heart attack. Another had died of some mysterious infection or illness but as the story was explained it seemed the underlying cause was acute alcoholism.
Two of us were sober in AA. The other AA member avoided me every time I tried to talk to him. I'm not sure what the problem was. He was someone I had felt kinship with in high school. I had been looking forward to seeing him. After chasing him the first evening of the reunion, I gave up, and noticed the next night he carefully kept his distance. There was something wrong between us but I had no idea what it was.
Three of us had been commercial bankers, probably the only three in the room who knew that banking can be interesting, at least before bankers become securities brokers instead of lenders.
The school hadn't changed much. The reunion was all around a football game Friday night. When I attended St. Francis the school was all about football. Then Saturday evening there was a Mass before the dinner. It wasn't mandatory and the attendance was light. Father Tony the new principal preached a sermon based on the workers in the vineyard parable. The moral I got from his homily was that even though our lives up until then may not have earned us a place in heaven, that we could still secure a place in heaven at this late date. It occurred to me that one way we might secure our eternal reward was by donating a large sum of money to the school. I'm prone to being too cynical about intentions in the Church.
Later when I cornered Father Tony he seemed to be in a hurry to move on and talk to someone else. We might have had a lot in common. Before he became a priest he was a banker in downtown LA, He was quick to deny I might know anyone he knew. Like a politician looking for voting blocks or donations, he didn't have time to waste with pointless questions. He made a good impression on everyone else. For myself maybe I'm a little jaundiced on bankers and priests.
I thought about the priest who taught us English the last two years at St. Francis. He taught us by reading out loud from the introductions to the pieces in our anthology. His interest wasn't really in teaching, he seemed to be more interested in administering to the spiritual needs of the rich.
Of course, some of us needed to tell people who we were, to explain to our classmates our success as if we were still 17 years old. I don't think anyone was doing it intentionally but it was the gist of some conversations that night. It was something that came out, something we needed to say. Having been bullied most of my youth from early on through high school, I was telling people that I could stand up for myself. I had been a cop. One classmate who had been a poor student told me, one of the smart kids he reminded me, that he was really smart and had been very successful and was very well off in spite of having been classed with the dummies.
Some if not most of our classmates seemed to be comfortable with who they were. All of us I think were trying to portray ourselves as successful, as happy with our lives. No one seemed unhappy. And it was true we were successes, we had done well.
I was interested in how we were aging and what that was like for others. I wasn't the only one who had had heart trouble already. I was asked, “How many colonoscopies have you had?” Someone I talked to had had a hip replacement. All of us are in our late 60's and we looked it except for one of us. Rick did look much younger than the rest of us. At first I didn't think he belonged to our group. I heard another classmate remark that he must be drinking formaldehyde on a regular basis. Our wives looked our age as well, the homecoming queen, the comfortable housewives.
I sat at the stag table, those of us from out of town, the bachelors or the divorced. It was a Catholic school so there was no talk of first, second or even third wives, no divorces or worse. No one was openly gay. One classmate wasn't there because he was in prison in Arizona or had been. I thought it was for financial fraud, but learned later it had been for burglary.
I was interested in who was retired and how they handled that and who wasn't. One classmate had retired for a year and half and said, he couldn't take it and went back to work as an insurance broker. About half the class seemed to be retired and happy with being done with it all and the other half were still working. Being in the retired group my bias is that those who are still working are refusing to give in to the aging process, to give up their work bound identity and just be. It wasn't so much that people were still working but as they told it they were working hard and they told me how much they were still valued in their jobs. We all do what we need to do, I was just happy I don't have to work anymore.
I was glad I had been there. In the end I had to admit to myself that while I wasn't rich, that my life hadn't followed a predictable path to success and prestige, but I had what I needed. I was saddened to know that Steve had been debilitated early in life. It was disappointing that most of the people I knew well in high school weren't there, a couple had passed away, others were out of contact and some just couldn't make it. I felt fortunate that I had survived and that after 68 years I wasn't embittered, that I wasn't a fool, and that like most of my classmates I was OK. We had done well.
