My friend Michelle of the Monterey shawl fame, talking to me once about high school reunions, told me she’d gone to all of hers: that at her fifth, people were still showing off. Some showed up in limousines. At her tenth, some people were still finding themselves. At her twentieth, they were the selves they’d grown up into.
I missed my first few, wanting to go, but being thousands of miles away, it just wasn’t going to happen. But I kept saying I was going to my 20th. Nothing would stand in my way. I would go. And I did.
It was worth every penny of the airfare: I got to see friends I hadn’t seen since graduation, and I have kept in touch with some of them ever since, never again to let them disappear from my life. And I got to see…a guy who had tormented me my first two years of high school, and then after that we had pretty much ignored each other’s existence as we went from class to class. I was surprised our senior year to find out he was turning out to be an okay person after all, though on my part that was simply a quiet observation from a distance.
And at the reunion, there he was. I took a chance and called him on the early-on behavior and the torment I’d gotten over the things he’d said, and he apologized. We’d been, what, fifteen years old then? What had we known about anything? Twenty years long of needing–well, not needing really, but only in terms of any future interaction with each other–that out-loud reconciliation. And we got it. I found myself delighted that he actually lived now not only in the town just north of mine here, but that his commute on his bicycle took him within two blocks of my house here every day. Wow. Small world. And we’d had to fly to Maryland to find out we were both right here in California.
He’s apparently moved back to Maryland since then, but one of his brothers was here in the area too. I found out because today the headline screamed about the Cisco executive, such a nice guy, with such a sense of joy in his life, on a business trip to Detroit: shot and killed. A city street, and, apparently, a life for a wallet. The face in the paper looked vaguely familiar. The name did too. When I read “grew up in Potomac, Maryland,” I gasped: that would be MY high school! I turned to see if there was an obit with more information. There was. He was. The family’s names. Oh goodness.
And the only reason I have any right to do what was imperative for me to do under such horrendous circumstances, to reach out with a quiet note of condolence that is going out tomorrow to a widow with two small girls to raise unfathomably alone now, is because I made peace with her brother-in-law eleven years ago. Even if she could never have known anything about any of that. I did.
Going to that reunion had given me the right, now, to care out loud. The note is written and ready to go.
I had no idea, when I was booking that ticket.