Time Travel and High School Reunions

It’s only the first week of August, but already I can feel the change in the air and see the change in the light, especially toward the late afternoon. Summer’s days are waning. Since childhood, this has always seemed like the year’s true end to me, and fills me with a melancholy sense of time passing.

As I got older, I realized that the melancholy feeling was related to the end of a summer off from school, so in a practical sense it really was the end of a year before the new year (as in school year) started.

When I was done with school, young and single, I didn’t notice it so much, but once I had kids of my own and they went off to school, it came right back again, and, though the kids are all grown now, I still feel it each August.

This year, I feel it more than usual. I think this is because after fourteen years away, I’m back on Long Island, in semi-retirement, settling into the snowbird life with my husband. When people ask me how I like being semi-retired, I can only equate it to the way I felt after I graduated high school and wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do as far as college or career. It’s an un-mooring. Not necessarily a bad thing, but a transition, for sure.

This past weekend happened to be the 45th reunion of the class of 1970, the class I would have graduated with at Northport High School had we not moved to Florida in 1966. Reunions come every five years now; we’re getting to that age where we don’t want to let a decade pass without seeing each other. Though I didn’t go to high school with this class, I did go all through elementary school and part of junior high with them. Our family visited Northport each summer that we lived in Florida. My father’s family is from this town and I have many relatives who are still here. I moved back here right after I graduated from high school in Florida. These people are my oldest friends. I know a number of them since kindergarten. Some were with me in every grade, all through childhood. We knew each other when we were all “becoming” ourselves. We share a common frame of reference that we don’t have with anyone else; we were kids together in this beautiful small town on the north shore of Long Island. We remember the same people, places, and events.

There’s a great comfort in being around the people you grew up with. Time and distance never breaks that bond of shared experience. I go to the reunions for this class because these are the people I’ve known the longest and have kept in touch with, more or less, my entire life.

I love anything related to time travel. The Time Traveler’s Wife is one of my favorite books. I loved science fiction practically since I learned how to read. “A Wrinkle in Time” anyone? (shout out to Miss Mazeau, librarian in Dickinson Avenue Elementary School for recommending it. I chatted with her niece who happens to be my former classmate at the reunion Saturday night and found out Miss Mazeau is still alive-in her nineties!) I’ve never forgotten an interview with Arthur C. Clarke during which he said that he firmly believed both time travel and teleportation would become a reality, and only wish I could live to see the day. But alas, I most likely will not, so I do my own version of time traveling whenever I can. It’s easy. Just take a drive through your hometown; the memories come flooding back as you pass all the familiar places of your youth. Or even better, go to a high school reunion.

Our high school reunions are now fun but bittersweet. Looking around at my now sixty-two and sixty-three year old friends and former classmates, seeing the lines in their faces (and in my own), the external signs of aging which cannot be denied, I feel an affection and tenderness for them that only grows stronger each time we meet. Even the youngest looking of us now no longer looks remotely young, and we're beyond caring much about that anyway. Now we care about each others’ health, spouses, kids and grandkids, the state of our lives at this point when we’re starting to feel our mortality more keenly with each passing year. We treasure the memories we share. I touch the face of a classmate who five years ago was fine, and now has Parkinson’s Disease. In my mind I see him as the grade school kid that I knew way back when. I am struck by his bravery, and I’m sad too. The unexpected losses spare very few. I see a woman I occasionally played with as a child who recently lost her husband, very suddenly. I express my condolences and my heart aches for her. She mentions our mutual childhood friends; the ones we played with. Time traveling. Some of our classmates are now gone, though they were with us five years ago. We have decades of joys and sorrows, accomplishments and setbacks, love and loss under our collective belts. We meet now and everyone understands that we’re not alone in our travels. We have these dear friends who travel with us. For a few hours we’re all together again, catching up on the present, but also remembering our shared past. Time traveling. We know that five years from now, our ranks will be thinner, and that they’ll continue to thin so that our group is smaller each time we meet. We all know this. Time will pass, and so will we, sooner or later. This realization makes our shared moments that much sweeter.

Someone brought the yearbook, the 1970 Tiger Tales. I thumbed through it, smiling at the young faces of kids with their whole futures ahead of them. The lyrics of Simon and Garfunkel’s song “Old Friends” were written across the pages;

“Can you imagine us years from today?
Sharing a park bench quietly
How terribly strange to be seventy
Old friends, memory brushes the same years
Silently sharing the same fears
Time it was and what a time it was, it was
A time of innocence, a time of confidences
Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph
Preserve your memories, they’re all that’s left you”

At our next reunion in 2020, we’ll be close in age to the seventy-year olds in that song. We become more important to each other as time rushes by, faster and faster. Our reunion took place at a Main Street watering hole, but it felt like home.