LETTERS FROM HOME: FIRE-WALKING WITH THE CLAN OF THE TIGER

July 5, 2001

Dear Leslie,

In high school, you don't comprehend a home truth that reveals itself with the passing reunions: These people, for better or worse, are your clan.

The same influences, the same environment, the same teachers and events colored your upbringing. You are as ineluctably tied to your classmates as to the rising and setting of the sun.

After high school, your clan expands to include college classmates and co-workers or maybe soldiers you walk through fire with. But what fire is hotter than high school?

DC and I attended the Central High School reunion for the classes 1960-1970 last weekend. She was sort of dreading it, supposing that most of the people she really wanted to see wouldn't come.

Maybe those who didn't come wondered why they'd want to spend time with former Central High School students they didn't know. I was surprised at how many people I knew or, not knowing, knew of or admired.

In these parts, high school athletes are heroes to the boys -- and more recently girls -- who are only a few years younger. There was Jerry Suedekum, one of my boyhood idols. And Mike Long, whose golf teams never lost a match during the four years he played.

Bob Goodwin, who coached the Tiger football and basketball teams through the end of the 1960s, was there. Everyone called him Goody back then, though never to his face. He was tough-minded and big-hearted. In gym class, he'd quarterback the flag football teams and sometimes sneak me a touchdown pass. Somehow he knew this skinny runt could catch one.

Coach Weldon Hager was there, too. He and Goodwin are from the same mold. His wife had a stroke, and he spends every day at a nursing home to be with her. Hager scared me as a teen-ager, but as an adult I've never shaken a warmer hand.

Bringing together a thousand middle-aged people from the same clan turned out to be a wonderful idea. Mark Stuart, who was a fine athlete in high school, goes down as one of Central High School's most valuable alumni for thinking it up.

As we ate barbecues for dinner, Flossie marveled at how young a woman looked we all knew to be older than us.

"Money can do a lot of things," our tablemate Ann pointed out. Ah yes, some of us have been drinking from the cosmetic Fountain of Youth.

Vickie was intimidatingly smart and pretty in high school. She's a physician now and at 50 has a 6-year-old daughter. See how brave we are.

There was Mary. As intimidation goes, few things compare to going out with a minister's daughter. One kiss had me worrying about the wrath of God.

Most everyone probably had a secret love walking around at the reunion. If DC and I hadn't collided at our 25th high school reunion, she'd still be mine. I felt sorry for the spouses who can never be part of the clan, never appreciate the intricacies of the relationships and friendships, the powerful feelings we had for each other.

But they have their own clans.

Acknowledging my own high school immaturity, I hoped most of us had done some growing up, and in most cases we had. But unlike acne, some afflictions of the personality aren't cured by adulthood.

By now, most of us have gone toe-to-toe with our vices, though I heard a tale of a narrow escape from a DWI after the reunion's first night.

The most sobering sight was the lists of classmates who have died. Car wrecks, heart attacks, the Vietnam War, drownings and gunplay have taken a toll. One of our classmates was executed.

Steve Wright, the person I was closest to in high school, died two years ago. Lots of people were missing him last weekend.

But death did not diminish the smiles we saw last weekend. In middle age, you recognize that the inevitability of death infuses each breath, each handshake, each embrace, each reunion with joy and urgency.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.