High School reunion, an Unexpected Opportunity

When I was young, I had the impression that the world consisted of only my family, my neighbors, the people at school and those who inhabited my favorite make believe worlds such as Lucy & Ricky, Fred & Ethel, Donny Osmond and of course, the entire Brady Bunch Family.  As I grew older I became aware of the world gradually expanding.  When I was an older teenager, I particularly remember a day at the beach when I started a conversation with another as the salt water idly eddied around our ankles.  I remember that when she told me that she was from Menlo Park Terrace I was delighted to think that "all the way at the shore", I could run into somebody that lived near me.  We quickly established a rapport by conversing about all the things that we had in common such as Food Town, Merit, Menlo Park Mall and the White Birch.  As my world continued to expand and I finished high school and college and relocated to the Bridgewater area, I occasionally ran into people that were from Woodbridge Township and the childish delight of those "it's a small world" discoveries has never left me.  I have had the opportunity to travel all around the world, but even if I had remained solely in good old Hershey, Pennsylvania what I am about to babble on about would still be true.

A couple of years after I graduated high school, my family moved to Maine and I married and moved to Albany, NY and later to Hershey, Pa.  With my family gone from New Jersey, I had little reason to return to my small hometown. I kept up with writing Christmas cards for a few years but even that began to fall away as my kids grew and I was more involved in their lives. It wasn't until 2008 when I heard about the death of "the boy next door", Dave LaBracio that I felt compelled to return to Fords.  Dave, always the most athletic and presumably the most healthy and arguably the most popular kid in school had succumbed suddenly to a cardiac event while at the beach with his wife and children.  Though I had not seen Dave in about 30 years, I felt compelled to attend his visitation.  Primarily because he and his family represented a large proportion of my childhood memories. As I arrived at the funeral home we were greeted by a friendly woman who introduced herself to me as "Dave's sister." She looked me directly in the eye without even a glimmer of recognition.  It was unbelievable but neither of us recognized the person who had grown up in the house directly beside them.  I tentatively asked if she was Kathy and she responded that she was and at that moment my son, Bradley who was 15 appeared behind me and she instantly recognized me by looking at his face and exclaimed "you're Anne Marie" which I thought was very cool!  Interestingly enough, that evening, many others remarked on the similarity in appearance between Bradley and I at the same age. Kathy brought me around the room and reacquainted me with the people that I once knew but had never left New Jersey.  Due to the passage of time, these people with whom I had once spent every day together with, sat beside in classes, passed in the hall, rode the bus with, attended events with and were the center of my world would have been unrecognizable to me and I to them without Kathy's help.  As she named names, I desperately searched for the 18 year old faces that I remembered so well but they were lost deep inside the chubbier and more aged faces of the 48 year-olds swirling around me at the funeral home. It was then that I realized with perfect clarity that the memories of those we care about are all that we will be left with someday.

In Memoriam WHS class of 1978

To further prove that point, in 2015, a friend I knew from high school, Katherine Ludwig, succumbed to lymphoma.  She and I were thrilled to discover in the 9th grade that we shared the same birthday as neither of us had ever met anybody else with the same birthday before.  We experienced a lot of life together, it was me that she called when she totaled her beloved Mustang and it was me that she asked for advice from when she had her son, Max, many years after I had had my children. Three years later, I still find it hard to believe that somebody whose heart began to beat inside her mother's womb on the very same day that my heart began to beat and who was so full of life and adventure has had her heart stilled while mine arbitrarily beats on.

In October of this year, I will attend my 40th high school reunion.  In my graduating class there were 613 people.  Of those 613, I was friends with very few but even I find it startling that I know more of the people listed on the "In Memoriam" page than I do of the 92 classmates who have RSVPd in the affirmative.  Sure, I recognize some of the names on both lists but I "KNEW" more of those who have passed. In a previous blog post ( https://annemariesmusings.blogspot.com/2017/06/dandelions-roses-patent-leather-shoes.html )  I wrote about Mary DiLeo, but I want to share with you some memories I have of other friends who have since passed.  Their names and photos are in the graphic to the left.

• Roy Corrigan: Roy was so quiet you hardly knew that he was there.  I was surprised to find that he had passed. 
• Mary DiLeo: https://annemariesmusings.blogspot.com/2017/06/dandelions-roses-patent-leather-shoes.html 
• Sue Dunne: I was with Sue in the hospital as she labored to give birth to her daughter Jessica, we played Scrabble together.  Later when she moved to Florida and I visited her, I got the absolute worst sunburn of my entire life.  
• Eddie Geary: Oh my goodness, no idea where to start, the Eddie memories are numerous. He is intrinsically part of every childhood memory that I have.
• Eugene Kauffman: He passed due to injuries he suffered in a car wreck while we were still in school.  For some reason on the last day he was at school before he died, he was standing near the window during the pledge of allegiance in homeroom.  That is how I still remember him.
• Christopher Kearney: What I remember the most about Chris is the back of his head.  I sat behind him in homeroom for 3 years.
• Dave LaBracio: See above
• Kathy Ludwig: See above
• Kenny Schneider: First kiss at a 9th grade dance.

Though I don't have clear memories of the others on the list I am profoundly sad that it is not possible for them choose to attend our reunion, which allows me to segue nicely into the reason for this blog post.

Elements of this post have been knocking against the insides of my brain for months.  Though I attended my first two reunions, I have had little interest in attending any of the others.  I think partly because I was on the fringes of high school life and partly because I believed that chapter to be firmly closed.  Since then I have come to realize though, that life is clearly delineated into chapters, but the story does not begin or end at the beginning of the next chapter.  Instead, the story continues and the next chapter is built upon what went before.  How many times have you read a book only to skim past something seemingly inconsequential only to have to frantically thumb back through the pages later to rediscover a character that was barely mentioned in an earlier chapter but is suddenly an integral part of the story?  That happens to me a lot both figuratively and literally. I am who I am today in part due to the faces and the places and the experiences that I had growing up and by coming of age in Woodbridge, NJ. Many of those fellow graduates have influenced my thinking (good and bad) and have helped me to understand the role that I have in the world.  I find it endlessly fascinating that those of us who began our life journey in the same place at the same time, while circling in the same orbit are now carelessly flung all around the country and the world.  

To circle back to the beginning of my post, the world is large but it is small, it is continually expanding but it is ever shrinking too.  While on our honeymoon on a small cruise ship in the French Riviera in 1990, Brad ran into a girl who had an interest in him in college.  Talk about awkward, but the delight in running into somebody you know in an unexpected place is unparalleled.  More recently while vacationing in Hawaii, I ran into a friend (Valari Boland) from home in a Honolulu restaurant. Suddenly the world is a little smaller and the joy of resurrecting shared memories cannot be explained.  That is how I feel about this upcoming reunion.  I have a deep need to reconnect with the people with whom I've shared memories and experiences.  Perhaps we did not experience the moments we shared from the exact same vantage point, but my goodness even while watching a movie in a cinema or a live show in a theater, we view it from different angles while still in the same room but collectively we are able to fill in the pieces obscured by the pole for the others. Whether they were my "friends" or not, there is something particularly special about collective memories and shared experiences.  I have been dismayed at the relatively low number of people who have responded in the affirmative to attend the reunion in October.  The excuses are varied and every one of them is legitimate, but I can't help but feel that this may be our final chance to be reunited.  I'm desperately hoping that some who have replied "no" will quickly have a change of heart.

From left: Me, Allyson Minarchi, Lorraine Miller, Chris Fischer
(maiden names)

When I attended by five and ten year reunions, I couldn't help but feel that I had something to prove. In my heart I was feeling competitive and had a desire to "show them" how successful I was, how handsome my boyfriend/husband was, how pretty my dress was or how awesome was my hair. There was a time in my life when I allowed the opinion of others to define me.  But now 40 years later, I have no need to impress anybody nor am I impressed by the success or status of others.  I have no desire to rehash old feuds, I am not prone to judging others and I don't care one iota if others want to judge me.  We have individually made our choices, forged our lives, raised our children, followed a career path and none of the cliques of high school remain but the friendships we made certainly do.  Suddenly, we are all equal; nobody is more popular or prettier, we have all aged, gained weight and survived the sting of pain and loss.  

What matters now is what still remains, honoring the past, hope for the future and the possibility of repairing old hurts and extending forgiveness to those who may have hurt us.  If by chance you are reading this post and you are considering whether or not to attend an upcoming reunion, please make every effort to do so.  Life is short, but God is good.  He is giving you an opportunity to close the circle and to examine how the circumstances of the past can help to heal your future.  If you have other plans, please change them, if you are struggling financially please say something quietly, if you live far away its very easy to book a plane ticket, if you have to work there is still plenty of time to find somebody to cover for you!  I have protected the weekend of my reunion and it is my most sincere hope that others will find a way to attend also.  I may not have been "friends" with the people who have replied 'yes" but what matters is that we have so much in common.  If I ran into any one of them in my small tourist town of Hershey, Pennsylvania and discovered by accident that we attended the same school and were in the same graduating class, I would feel as though I hit the jackpot.  On October 12, 2018, I want to feel like I've hit the jackpot 500 times.