The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star, Norfolk, VA
Copyright 1993
Wednesday, November 17, 1993
DAILY BREAK
25 YEARS LATER, THE CLASS LOOKS BACK, ENTERS A NEW AGE
TERRY CARTER, SPECIAL TO THE DAILY BREAK
Terry Carter, a former Virginian-Pilot/Ledger-Star reporter, now is a writer living in Alexandria.
SOMETIMES YOU smile at faces that seem familiar, but they turn out to be the wife or husband of someone you knew. Sometimes you smile at unrecognized faces that obviously know who you are. They call attention to their nametags, which bear yearbook photos that once were them.
But most of the time, as you move about the huge hotel conference-room turned-cocktail-lounge, the heart leaps with familiarity that bridges decades and you reconnect. Such was the 25th reunion of the Woodrow Wilson High School class of '68 last weekend at the Holiday Inn on the Portsmouth waterfront. In a lot of ways we've been each the measure of the other throughout our lives, consciously or not. And here it all comes home.
Some of us went through all or much of 12 years together. We gossiped on each other, we had fistfights back when guns were for grownups, we built parade floats, we passed notes, we groped at maturity in back seats, we did all the things that would-be adults called teenagers do.
For me and I think a lot of others, reconnection was the backdrop to this reunion. We'd gotten together after 10 years and partied at a beachfront hotel. We did it again five years ago for the 20th, with yet more kids to talk about, new heights in careers and more partying. But this time it was different.
We're not over the hill, but the terrain now bears the countours of a crest. Midlife is as real as our wrinkles and bellies and butts, as palpable as the pates of those many who qualified in the "most likely to recede" competition. In these two evenings of dancing, drinking and talking, we're braving midlife's doubts together and boosting each other's feelings. We're in a football huddle in the game of life.
This time in our lives is, it turns out, another sort of adolescence. Where once we struggled to define ourselves as budding adults, the task now is redefinition. Again there's pressing need for new and increased validation. We still buy a lot of acne cream, but now its for our kids. These days we're the target group for diets and mirror-tricks with hair.
We joke about our appearances. Those few who manage to look a lot like they did back then are praised. Some have scars on the outside. All of us suffer plenty of them inside. Seeing each other again lightens burdens for a couple of evenings. The flash of faces so familiar from long ago works like a mind-altering drug.
But the milestones weigh in. The "In Memoriam" page in our class directory grew, listing seven more of our 375 whose years amounted to just two score or so. But life is still what we're about. An award was given for having the first grand-children.
We talked about how our bodies had changed - often in a big way. That's the cute part. We also spoke of ailments both routine and serious, of sudden difficulty in reading at close range, of cohorts losing limbs to diabetes, other still battling drug habits, a couple of the more promising of us on the streets debating the negative with schizophrenia's demons.
It wasn't long before I was off to the side of the room with two who battle breast cancer. There probably were others in similar straits among the 85 class members here, and the spouses who came along. Judy is one. She's still as vivacious and shapely and cute as when she was on the homecoming court. She's an Atlanta
kindergarten teacher and mother of two teenagers. Nothing showed of the chemotheraphy that burned and chilled her veins just last year. Few of us know life, or live it, as she does.
The same with Gilda, the sweetly solid but eye-catching wife of Mike, the guy who'd somehow surfed all the time and still managed to be No. 2 in our scholastic rankings. Gilda took the deadly medicine, too, four years ago. She and Judy are breast cancer
survivors. My wife wasn't, and they wanted to talk about it, and about my soon-to-be- teenagers who've never had a mother.
Some of us clustered during the evening in the old cliques, and it was like old times. We'd look around the room laughing and try to figure out who'd changed the most, and the least. There was some regression for its own sake. I confess to the catty remark that some of us who are unrecognizable now were unrecognizable then. It
made me as recognizable in some other ways now as then.
Our old Wilson High School is no more, though the building stands. The city funneled students into a single facility across town. Thanks to one member of our class who battled the school board, that other place recently took on our old name. But it seems
hollow to many of us. Then again, it doesn't much matter. We had what we had and we still have each other.
May we meet again.
