Finding School Friends Through the Grapevine

I just learned something yesterday. A girl who I knew in school outside Chicago had lived here in Moorpark a few years before I moved here. I will be marking 22 years in this same house in a couple days. I also didn’t know that she now lives in Westlake Village.

It is a long way and 40 years from where and when I went to high school. My 40^th reunion will be this fall. It is hard to convince former classmates to care much about it and actually show up.

As a way to get back in touch after such a long time, I came up with the idea of writing a series of profiles of my former classmates for the Patch.com websites back east. The girl who lived in Moorpark was one of the people I plan to interview because I knew, through the grapevine, that she became a veterinarian in the Valley. My memories of her are from when we were 16 years old and dancing side by side as Hot Box dancers in Guys and Dolls.

There seem to be two groups; the ones who have stayed in touch with their friends from school and those who have moved on to other cities, other pursuits and other friends. One thing has not changed and that is the grapevine. I mean that in a good sense.

When I was growing up in Glencoe, no one ever moved. No one moved in, no one moved out. Okay, two people moved in and one person moved away. No one’s parents were divorced. Nearly all of the mothers stayed at home and drove us to our various classes and appointments. In the evenings, no one locked their doors. Neighbors would regularly slip through the back door after dinner and yell, “Hello! Anybody home? It’s just me!” And a voice from another room would say, “C’mon in. We’re in the den. Are you hungry?”

It really was like that. Children didn’t make play dates. We didn’t come home from our friend’s house on our bikes until way past dark. We often ate dinner at our friend’s house at the last minute. Very informal and intimate.

After graduation, we scattered to all corners of the country for college. Some stayed connected and others couldn’t wait until they could leave and start anew.

This reunion has been a monster for the organizers. My high school was built to handle the overflow of baby boomers back in the late 1960s so there was an east campus and a west campus. The reunion covers both and that means a combined graduation class of 1400.

As I talk with various people from my class, I have been struck by how different their public persona is from their private personalities. They are allowing me into their worlds of frustration, business failures and relationship difficulties along with recounting the victories and the rewards.

I hear even more honesty in their voices. I hear people who are finished with the career/family stage and now have no idea what to do with the next 25 years. Some speak of moving to another state, or finding a new challenge. But the men and women of the class of ’71, including those who have seen spectacular success, are now struggling with remaining relevant to themselves.

Even people that I barely knew back then did not hold back in our conversations, which often last nearly an hour. By the time it is over, I feel that I have made another new friend, someone whose troubles and triumphs have spilled out, often in words that seem to be evaluating their own lives as we speak. That casual openness from our youth seems to conquer the hesitation of adulthood.

I think that I may have chosen this project as a way for me to get back in touch with my own childhood and my own dreams of a 16 year old girl. So far, so good.