first-ever high school reunion coming up

As for many people in intellectual fields, high school wasn’t the high point of my life. At the time I really hated it, in fact. But it doesn’t leave any bitter traces in memory by now, perhaps because I’m geographically so far from the experience that it approaches irrelevance. By contrast, some people I know who stayed physically nearby remain somewhat scarred by that era of life.

I’m from a very small town (3,000 people then, a mere 4,000 even now), and of the 75 or so kids in my graduating class, I’d say 45 or 50 were with me from Kindergarten all the way through senior year of high school. I really grew up with these people, in other words, and in some cases their parents grew up with my father.

Initially I was indifferent to the 25th reunion (though I almost went to the 20th), and was only talked into attending by one good friend who really basked in the high school experience– star football player and so forth. But as the time approaches I’m finding it a potentially more and more fascinating event. How often do you get to see a whole group of people simultaneously who you know extremely well, but have not seen at all in 25 years? There should be all kinds of surprises, and also a number of people with whom it will simply be a pleasure to catch up.

They time this to coincide with the town festival, Heritage Days, which I last attended seriously at about age 11. And when all is said and done, it’s probably one of the more charming small towns in the entire Midwest; much of it is on the national historic registry. Lots of brick streets and nice old houses, and generally more the feel of New England than of Iowa.

My parents are no longer there, however. Back in the mid-1990’s they relocated into a culturally very different area less than a half hour away.

The house I grew up in was purchased by the town and deliberately burned for fire department practice in extinguishing the fire. They then tore down the remains, bulldozed everything away, and built a new municipal baseball field on top of it. Only a few distinctive trees remain from what was once a quasi-rural childhood landscape, and even with those trees it is hard to calculate exactly where the house once stood. The burning took place in 1997 or 1998, and my first visit to the property afterward was quite a shock.

It’s a place that’s burned pretty deeply into memory, as you might well imagine given that I lived there from the ages of about 3-18. If I were ever to use those ancient oratorical tricks where you memorize a long speech by putting each paragraph in one area of well known spatial location and then walking through that space, then I would certainly use this town as my mnemonic pillar. It’s quite easy to walk up and down every street in my imagination, cover the whole town, and presumably not miss much of anything.

You have to remember as well that there was no obvious reason why I thought I would ever go too far from there. Five generations preceding me had chosen not to go far, at least on one side of the family. Both of my brothers left as well, and I doubt there’s much that would be capable of luring us back at this stage of history.