You can't go home again, but you can go back to highschool.

There are people who love going to their high school reunions, I am not one of them. It makes me uneasy to be greeted, hugged and handsqueezed by a person who obviously knows me, but who, while I stare at their bobbing name tag and my brain searches in vain for a connection to a name, is pretty much a blank to me. "Oh hey," I say as the deepest memory synaspe comes up empty, "Good to see you!" But these are nice people, forgiving of failed memories, willing to fill in some details and, if I can get my head around the idea that there is someone else in the world, experiencing the same er-er-uh situation as I am.

Look at these people. How could you not have a good time around these people?


Of course, this is the part where I start to talk about how, no matter how sweet the memory, there is always pain in the recollection, but tonight I don't feel that way. It felt pretty good to talk about trying out for track, or who started the protest over the lock rental policy, or why it took forty years to honor the basketball team for their exploits. It even felt good, in an odd human hearted way, to talk about who had died, who was missing and what had been heard about those who didn't show up last night. It hasn't been like that for me at other reunions that's why my friend Annie has had to guilt me into coming every five years, it's always seemed to me to be an exercise in insincerity mostly because I was so disconnected. I think now that I was in some kind of time~warp, believing that the people I was seeing were the same as they were in 1965, that is to say, not any real friends of mine. What a jerk I am. Was. Whatever.

We were spared any long winded speeches or fakie awards, unless all that happened while I was down at the bar end of the room. We danced pretty good for a bunch of middle-aged fogeys, Annie would have won both Best Dressed and Most Fabulous Dancer with No Morning~After Hip Ache Problem awards if there had been fakie awards and passersby must have thought we were having a comedian's convention based on the amount of laughter bubbling out of the room.

So you can't go home again, but you can go back to high school. You can dance with the head cheerleader and hang around with the really cool kids, you can find yourself planning on having drinks in the city with your newfound friends. Friends you met forty four years ago and are just now getting to know.