"Taking the Long Way": Take 2

When I told my father a couple of weeks ago that I was planning to go to my 30th high school reunion, he asked me why. Always a succinct and insightful man, he had put his pinky on the right question. And though he's also kind enough to say, "That makes sense" when I answered, "I think I'll have a horrible time, but I'll regret it if I don't go," my response did not persuade even me that this was a good idea. At the least I thought an appearance, however brief, would yield rich anecdotes, much like a bad blind date--the difference being that this promised to be a bad date in a hall of mirrors.

Here's the back story: When I transferred to The Lovett School in eighth grade where many of my classmates had gone since kindergarten, I was a social misfit. My above-the-collar haircut was short enough to be regulation--for the boys. I was petrified of the opposite sex. The school I had gone to before was so poor academically that I was two years behind in almost every subject. Hell, I even said the Lord's Prayer with the wrong ending given that I had come from the Christ the King, a Catholic school where I was the only Jew, before I went Episcopalian. And while I caught up academically, that only widened the gap in my popularity. I spent Saturday nights writing English papers with my grandmother. I hoped that underneath my nerdly exterior there was a normal person, and I couldn't wait to get out of that suffocating environment to find out. The last time I was on the Lovett campus, Jimmy Carter was president and the No. 1 hit single was "Shadow Dancing" by Andy Gibb (the Bee Gees' "Night Fever" was No. 2).

To say that Lovett did not "light up my life" (that year's No. 3 hit by Debby Boone) is a tremendous understatement. When I thought about the upcoming reunion, my mind kept replaying that Dixie Chicks' song "The Long Way Around" about bucking the system while everyone else stays in the same zip code where their parents live. I haven't lived in Atlanta since I went off to college. But 30 years is a long time. So having had a conversation with myself that I would just find the people who had been my friends back in the day and not bother with the others, I went . . . and had the best time! One of my favorite conversations was with the class of '78's football star, a guy--now a man--with whom I had never before exchanged a vowel. Never mind that as one of my friends emailed me today, XX "used to have PROMINENT hair" and now he is bald. What stood out for me was his kindness. There was my friend Clare, who I also haven't seen in three decades. She was wearing the same wry expression and the same Oxford cloth shirt that I left her in. And there was the woman who said I seemed really comfortable with myself. To my surprise, there are some moments when I think she might be right.

There are a lot of downsides to aging, but, depending on where you start out, I think you either gain confidence (me) or humility (nearly everyone else in my class). Miraculously it seems that the see-saw balances. 

Just in the past couple of years I've wondered how one can arrive in middle-age and still make the same mistakes. My mistake this time was to assume the worst when, in reality, we were just a tiny band of well-wishers that gathered in a lush backyard a block from my parents' house, listened to Earth, Wind and Fire, leafed through the high-school yearbook, and went home at 11:00 p.m.