RIVER CITY JOURNAL: YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN -- BUT NOT RIGHT NOW

School reunions create ties that bind, but the strings get all snarled up if they aren't tended. Maybe next year. Or 2005 for sure.

The annual alumni banquet at the school in my favorite hometown is coming up -- or possibly has just been held. I have for most of my life never been a school-reunion aficionado, so excuse me if my facts are a little fuzzy.

It has been three decades-plus since my graduation from high school. From time to time I see photographs of former classmates in my favorite hometown weekly newspaper, whose editor was a classmate. When I see these pictures, I am always struck by how old everyone else is getting. In my mind, as I look in the mirror to shave every morning (except most Sundays when I assume a forgiving God understands a once-a-week lapse, although most church hierarchies frown on following the almighty's example of resting on the seventh day, even if it is only mowing your whiskers) I haven't aged since the senior prom.

But a hometown visit is a brutal reminder of the passing years. For one thing, the red-brick elementary school was torn down years ago. Just this past year the red-brick high school was razed. Unsuitable for human occupation was the verdict of a well-paid structural architect. About all that's left is the blue-granite gymnasium, where hard-fought basketball games were played, where non-athletes endured sweaty calisthenics and killer dodge ball during mandatory PE and where band and chorus concerts received standing ovations year after year. And behind the old gym is the white-frame building known in my day only as the band room where Joe English turned basketball players, farm boys, future mothers of twins, cheerleaders, budding politicians and a few potential prison inmates into a symphonic masterpiece. Don't ask how. He just did.

Graduates of my hometown high school seem to fall into two groups. There are the homebodies who either found jobs or found the unemployment and welfare offices, or went away to school but came back mostly to teach. Some came back to practice law or be doctors, but a small town's economy can only stretch so far. Then there are the escapees, the ones who left as soon as they could for college or jobs or war or bank robbery in some far-off place. This second group can be further subdivided into those who never looked back, and those who come back often but leave again when evening comes.

I am in the last group. When I left after high school, I thought that, aside from family commitments, I would never long for that particular town in that particular remote part of the Ozarks. But being age-advantaged and suffering, as I do, from chronic oldtimer's disease, I find that my attachments, even though they haven't been nurtured very well, are extraordinarily strong and vibrant. From time to time I run into someone I haven't seen since the early 1960s, and we pick up conversations that were never quite finished. It's really that easy.

When I saw the announcement of this year's alumni reunion, I seriously toyed with taking the big plunge. I have never been to any of the reunions of my high school class. I have kept up with only two or three of my classmates. So far I haven't fully committed.

Over those intervening years, the hometown has changed, and it has stayed the same. You know what I mean? So many familiar buildings and houses and faces that never seem to change, and so many new intrusions like a stoplight, and an ATM, and a McDonald's, and touch-tone dialing, and cable TV, and a Chinese restaurant for gosh sakes.

I vividly remember the town's centennial in 1955, the pageants, and the contests, and the fireworks, and the carnival, and the parade. Now consider this: In less than a decade the old town will be eligible for a sesquicentennial blowout. Maybe -- just maybe -- by then I will be ready to go home again. Really.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.