50th Reunion

I went to my high school's 50^th reunion this weekend. It was not easy. I don't think it was easy for a lot of us there. It was a good weekend but for me there was a lot of stress in just showing up to see people I hadn't seen in 50 years. I spent a lot of time prior to this event just thinking how I would appear to my old classmates.

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 50^th 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.

Cathy

She calls herself Kate now.  When I first met her she was Cathy, Cathy Bruemmer.  I thought it was Brenner, an Irish girl, and quickly learned it was Bruemmer and she was German.  The e is an anglicized addition, an attempt to get Americans to pronounce Brümmer with an umlaut over the u.  Or maybe it was just how an Ellis Island Immigration official, probably Irish, spells an umlaut u when he first hears it. 

Her parents were Midwestern Germans, her father Catholic from Illinois and her mother a convert from Nebraska, solid hard working people, though her father had a subtle and delightful silly streak.  He didn’t work that hard when he was being paid but he liked his own projects.  He built an airplane once and flew it until he crashed it.  He enjoyed life in a German way.  Her mother, the stiffer spine in the family softened with a little Thunderbird wine in the evening, was a ranch raised girl who had come to the big city during World War II.  Wilbert was 4F and stayed home which gave him a great advantage with beautiful women, an advantage I don't think he usually had.  Minnie was not only strong willed and hard working; she was good looking too.   

Cathy Bruemmer was one of a kind.  Her parents lived in a cracker box house facing the quiet streets of El Segundo, but the back wall thinly divided their home from Imperial Highway and the runways of LAX.  Cathy was a free spirit.  When I first met her, she was wearing one of her long dresses that she made for herself, I think it was green with a garish print.  We had just come out of the 50’s, her father drove a Ford Falcon station wagon,but she was well into the 60’s, ahead of the rest of us.  She was attending Mount Saint Mary’s College on a scholarship and worked in the fabric department at Penny’s where her mother also worked. 

She did all the cooking for her family.  Her father didn’t like onions or spicy food of any kind as he defined it.  It was after we were married that she bought her first garlic.  But within the confines of her family, she cooked and baked wonderfully, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and German chocolate cakes.  After we were married and her imagination was free to concoct anything she wanted including onions, garlic and even occasionally olive oil, she was a great cook, though her food, Italian, Russian, Chinese or French always had a faintly Midwestern German subtext.   

She was excited about movies, literature, and art.  She was a free spirit.  She was in trouble with the administrators at Mount Saint Mary’s; they knew the long dresses were a sign of rebellion.  Essentially she was a good kid.  She had been 5’7” in the third grade and all of 80 pounds and it was only now in her freshman year of college that she was growing into her own height with hips and small sexy breasts.  She was really quite pretty but she didn’t know it.  I don’t think she’d ever really been kissed yet, never had a boyfriend, and didn’t do drugs. 

Many years later she liked to drink white wine with ice cubes and to smoke pot before she had sex though she could do just as well on a couple of margaritas.  She was still outspoken and still a little naïve.  She was working as a teacher at a Catholic high school in Santa Fe Springs.  A co-worker had been disciplined unjustly and in the lunchroom one day Cathy said, loud enough to be heard, “That’s why we should have a union.”  She was fired the next day. 

I fell in love and in lust with her at first sight.  A week later when we got together we made out until our brains nearly fell out and groped each other virginally.  We were Catholic and had grown up that way.  We were well suited to each other.  We were excited about each other but we didn’t know what to do with it and in fact didn’t make love until our wedding night, which we did wonderfully, after two years of Catholic foreplay. 

I think I was the first man, very young man, to appreciate her and she was beautiful, beautiful long legs and a lithesome body.  She was always envious of women who were fuller in the chest, but I thought she was wonderfully shaped.  She looked like a girl to me.  She had an inept grace about her.  She reminded me of a young and clumsy gazelle, who could jump beautifully into the air and stumble a moment later on her long legs. 

We were inseparable from shortly after we met.  Her family welcomed me and we did our college friends together.  I had become part of the literary and artistic circle at Loyola and I think Cathy found my friends very exciting.  We did her large circle of family friends together.  She was exciting intellectually, a voracious reader like myself, and though her family were working class Republicans, she was becoming a liberal Democrat. 

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed in 1964.  It authorized President Johnson to execute the Vietnam War but it really didn’t become an overriding consideration for college students until 1966 when Cathy and I met.  I received a IA draft status.  IA, one 'A' as we said it, meant you go next.  A grammar school friend of mine was killed in the DMZ in May, 1967, and I decided for Cathy and me that I would join the Air Force and hope I could avoid the fate of a draftee in the jungles of Vietnam. 

In the summer of 1967 I went off to Basic Training and then technical training at Keesler AFB in Mississippi.  In April the following year at the end of training I received orders along with the rest of my class to go to England.  I had been an English major.  Cathy was a history major.  I went home and we got married.  I was home a couple of weeks before the wedding could be put together and finally we enjoyed on our wedding night what we had put off so long and a honeymoon drive to San Francisco. 

At Christmas time in Mississippi I had been invited to bed by a young woman named Charlene and being a virgin I didn’t know how to say no.  For a couple of weeks Charlene and I made the beast with two backs badly and then life went on.  Stupidly in a very drunken moment, I chose to tell Cathy about this liaison the night before I left for England. 

I know it was devastating, but she struggled through it and joined me in England a month later.  We didn’t talk about it and never worked through it.  I think it was always a smoldering resentment that Cathy had against me for the rest of our marriage.  We conceived Sean during our first summer.  We both loved England and we did OK together.  There were resentments and struggles but nothing terrible. 

We lived offbase in the town of Bedford.  After a couple of years, a gypsy came to the door one day and Cathy invited her in.  Cathy told me about it when I got home.  The Gypsy predicted my promotion to Staff Sergeant and something about us which Cathy wouldn’t reveal.  I always had the feeling that the Gypsy predicted we wouldn’t last as a couple and that Cathy believed her.  It seemed after the Gypsy that as hard as we might try our marriage was always doomed. 

We had a hard time while I went to UCLA and she stayed at home with our two sons.  We struggled in our rented house when I got a job at Bank of America.  I think I have a normal libido and like most men I would love to enjoy most of the attractive women I see.  I am also a bit of puritan and even today I don’t have the energy or flexible conscious enough to cheat, not that it doesn’t seem attractive sometimes, but just that it’s too much trouble.    

Having gotten married at 21 with very little experience prior to that, I did wonder what it was like on the other side of the fence and as Jimmy Carter would say, I wasn’t faithful in my thoughts, but for the most part I acted faithfully. 

Cathy had her faults.  She was a terrible spendthrift, she was always buying something that saved us hundred of dollars that we didn’t have the money to afford.  She could be obnoxious and abrasive.  And together we probably drank too much.  But overall we did as well as most couples do and potentially probably could have stayed married for a lifetime. 

Unfortunately our minds didn’t go that way.  By the 1980s we seemed to hate each other.  Whatever either one of us did seemed to be against the other.  We came from an old view of relationships, husband working, wife at home, and that didn’t work well post-feminism.  I thought Cathy took advantage of me and I was stuck on a treadmill and I’m sure she found me limiting and critical of the new life she was trying to lead, a new life she had always been trying to lead.  And what I thought of as the curse of the gypsy hung over us.  My marriage in tatters, frustrated I looked elsewhere and found one woman who would sleep with me once and others who might.  I was no longer even trying to be faithful. 

Cathy graduated from Cal State LA and I think she felt empowered and limited in the roles we set for each other.  Finally in 1983 we separated and in the following year divorced. 

I’ve never regretted divorcing Cathy, now Kate.  She’s a good person and tries hard but even today 30 years later we only accommodate each other as friends.  I find her naturally abrasive.  I love her and I care about her, she’s the mother of my three sons, and today she is like a sister that I’m not really that close to.  Without our history we might not be friends at all. 

It makes me feel bad.  She was so beautiful and so exciting when she was 18, I wonder what happened to the girl I loved and regret my part in making her at all bitter.  Alcohol played a large part in it.  I’m of the school that accounts the downward spiral of alcoholism almost inevitable until one is given the grace to leave it. 

It is a sad thing.  I wish I had been able to give my boys a stable home life until they were 18.  I wish that I myself had been able to have a stable middle class existence, enjoying the warmth of a home and roots, instead of the searching rootlessness that was my 40’s and even 50’s.  

But life goes on and I’m here and I’m not there, and I prefer it this way.