REUNION ROAD

HOMETOWN HIGH SCHOOL

The first Linden High School reunion I attended was my twentieth. Before then, I began my life’s adventures by moving to Massachusetts to work for the Veterans Administration, enroll in law school, and then raise a family (the two stepsons I acquired at my wedding in 1972, and the son and daughter born of our marriage). My tenth reunion would have been in the year I got married, obviously not an opportune time to time-travel back to my home state of New Jersey.

For the twentieth, we enjoyed the road trip from Massachusetts to my childhood home. My mom Rose took care of the children while Paul and I went to the Holiday Inn ballroom for the big event. I had always been a serious student with my nose in a book (I never attended a high school football game) but now I was on top of the world. I had somehow changed from the prim girl with bangs in my yearbook photo into a confident, dark-haired beauty with a handsome husband and had become the woman I was meant to be.

The room was full of excitement as the 38 year-olds recognized each other and joyously reconnected, even if we had not been friends before. Most of us had grown up in the town and attended school, and synagogue or church together, since we were children. We knew each other’s parents and siblings; it felt more like an exuberant family reunion.

We tore up the dancefloor with the jitterbug, the Stroll, and slow-dancing to Earth Angel until the midnight hour.

high school reunion

her startling smile

without braces

I was surprised that Alice B., who started to work for Bell Telephone upon graduation, told me she was retired after a twenty year career. It seemed shocking to me that a classmate had reached that point at such a young age – good for her! Sadly, there was a memorial dedication to ten deceased classmates and that was out of order too. At the time, loss of our peers felt unreal. These “kids” were unfairly denied the future that should have been theirs.

Some people brought spouses, including me, but they seemed out of place, except for the couples whose marriages arose from teen romances in high school, like Rochelle S. to Arnie. L., and Irene M. to Larry H.

When we got home, I asked my husband Paul if he had a good time, and I will never forget his response (although it was good-natured): “most of the time, I was sitting at the hotel bar with a divorced fireman who needed someone to listen to his problems.” I got the point!

I also attended my fortieth LHS reunion when I would have been in my mid-fifties. This time, I went on my own. I wore a gorgeous purple satin strapless dress. My sister-in-law lent me her fur coat for the cold winter night. My husband was a hairdresser and in the fashion business, so I knew how to glam up, a far cry from the nerdy honor roll student with jumpers and knee socks.

high school reunion 

my crush and I vanish

into the time machine

After that, as email communication emerged and people also connected on Facebook, someone tried to mount another in-person reunion, but folks were scattered around the country or connected online so didn’t respond to the call for an in-person event. Times had changed and so had we.

WHAT LIFE BROUGHT

Fast forward to 2019, when I went out to dinner with eight longtime women friends. We had met when our children were in kindergarten. It was thirty years later and we treasured our bond starting in young motherhood.

It was a small but high-spirited reunion in a private room in a Chinese Restaurant, with talk of our children’s weddings and careers, newborn grandchildren, extensive travels, and memories of those crazy years when we did it all – balancing work, children, marriage, and founding the Montessori school!

As the evening wore on, a strange feeling of distance from the conversation came over me. I tried to figure out what was going on until it struck me that I was the only one in the group who had lost her husband. Considering the losses of friends and family we had all experienced over the recent years, I was shocked at the realization that I was the first in this unfortunate category.

I continued to join in the conversation without missing a beat, describing my recent Paris adventures as we shared dessert. But I felt different from the others, looking in from another world that I had become a part of when my husband had died five years before (December 2013).

I don’t know what triggered the dark little cloud that formed over me on this friendly occasion. While their many voices blended into word salad for me, I waited for the unsettled feeling to pass. It occurs to me now that I had underestimated the power of loss and would never be free from it. Something had triggered it and it grabbed me without warning.

I remember how I used to say that becoming a mother transformed me the moment it happened, that the person I was for the first twenty-nine years of my life disappeared into thin air when I felt the overwhelming love and connection with our new child that superseded all else.

Losing my beloved life partner after forty-one years of marriage transformed me in the same powerful way. Everything I was, along with the blessed life we had, moved into memory, swallowed up by the catastrophe. My life experience had set me apart, having dedicated my life and love to another and then accompanying him to the end of his journey, where we parted.

As my friends and I said our goodbyes after dinner and I was driving home, the otherworldly feeling dissipated in the light rain. I wanted nothing more than to feel normal again. But on the inside, I had to accept what life had both brought me – and taken away – and that there was a price to pay in the currency of grief.

COLLEGE DAYS

This summer, I have a reunion at my women’s college in New Brunswick, New Jersey. My freshman roommate Diane remains my close friend to this date, and my hometown and college friend Anne value our friendship renewed ten years ago. Another classmate just published a book about a year out of her life sorting through and clearing out a relative’s house packed floor to ceiling with hoarded possessions, family memorabilia, and accumulated trash. We happily supported each other by reading each other’s books (Eileen Stukane: The House that Held Everything) and she ordered my book of haiku entitled Cotton Moon.

Despite the lifetime I have lived since my high school and college years, I look forward to celebrating the young woman I was when the world was on the verge of opening up to me with possibilities that I could never imagine.

college reunion

in no time at all

the way we were

From my vantage point in 2026, I know I have room for gratitude and joy.

Photo of Anne and me on the Douglass College campus.(2016)