LETTERS FROM HOME: TAKING ROLL CALL 30 YEARS AFTER HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION

July 16, 1998

Dear Julie

Five years ago, DC and I sat on a darkened park bench outside a K.C. hall while inside the people we graduated from high school with were reunited. DC and I were just talking, reacquainting ourselves, though we already knew we wanted enough privacy not to be interrupted by old classmates with recollections of the old hangout called Wimpy's or the requisite briefing on kids and jobs and marital status.

This conversation was very much about the present, as in finding out who we'd each become, and as hours passed the future began insinuating itself.

When I asked if she could imagine herself being married to me, a breathtakingly theoretical question at that point, she moved to the other side of the bench. "Maybe," she said.

We watched as the last of our classmates left and the lights in the building blinked off. But our party was just beginning.

I always will have a fondness for high school reunions. Like some other favorite things, they seem to improve with age. With a few individual exceptions, most of the pretensions have been dropped after so many years, and we have realized that our souls are more important than our egos.

We seek out those we felt fond of back then and discover that feeling has not changed though the years have altered most of us appreciably. It helps to wear little name tags bearing your yearbook picture.

Vietnam claimed some of us in the class of '68. So did murder and other misfortunes. One of our classmates, Kermit Melton, died saving some girls from drowning in the Mississippi River.

It means something to return to the scene of our high school crimes -- most of them misdemeanors -- every few years, to reconnoiter the landscape, take roll call and measure how far we've come.

DC invited some of her old buddies over for lunch the next day. We circumnavigated the table, each telling the story of our lives in synopsis so concentrated that the effect was almost poetic.

After 30 years at large in the world, the trajectory of our lives seems familiar to us now, which is not to say the course doesn't change due to divorces and deaths and new loves.

Ann inherited a company young when her parents died soon after she graduated and has become a business woman of repute. When she speaks you listen closely because you sense the hard experience behind the words.

Beth told of dressing up an old Volkswagen with flocking, of selling everything and taking a six-month adventure around America in a doomed attempt to keep her family together. She divorced, went back to school for a master's degree in health management and learned how to give massages.

Valerie runs a credit union in Kentucky, divorced after she wearied of attending Al-Anon meetings, and dates a 60-year-old lawyer who lives in another city. She has a personal trainer and supplemented her store-bought chicken salad with extra chicken. She likes life full now.

Jane does the marketing for the zoo in Portland, Ore. She has raised a bunch of kids who were not her own but needed someone. She and her animals live on a farm. Her husband moved out on Independence Day.

Barbara moved to Canada with a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, became a newspaper reporter, divorced and went back to school for a teaching degree. Now she's writing for a university and is happily engaged to be married.

DC and I told our stories too, and there was considerable story to tell before ours entwined.

We are all so much more than those people pictured on our name tags could have imagined.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.