Time in a bottle

This summer I accompanied the brunette to her 50-year high school reunion. I really didn’t want to go. I mean, I skipped my own 50th reunion six years ago, and the one before that. The 10- and 20-year reunions were fun, but after a while they begin to seem as dreary as that face I see in the mirror every morning.

So I told Tess no. For some reason she kept at it.  I finally relented. I’ve gotten better at discerning the things I must refuse and the things I probably shouldn’t. I bought a new shirt and a new pair of shorts and steeled myself for an introvert's nightmare: a weekend of small talk among total strangers. At least, I thought, they’d all be unaware of the countless regrets and embarrassments that define my own memories of high school. 

We drove to Ellensburg, a middling college town best known for its rodeo and unceasing wind. The former classmates gathered Friday night at a dive bar on the edge of town. There was the obligatory guy in a MAGA hat and another in one of those shirts with the surly snake. A very few had obviously given up. Fewer still looked older than me. But then this was the Class of  '75 – just kids! Whom I would have dismissed as callow dorks when I was a senior. Now, of course, senior has a different connotation. Joke’s on me.

The first night of any reunion is always the same: the guarded glances when you walk in, the feigned delight in recognizing someone you’d have crossed the street to avoid. The awkward pivots when recognition and memory turn out to be mismatched. Still, my wife had a little circle of good friends, and I was pleased that they all seemed pretty cool. I found myself wishing they were my friends too.

Tess sang in the choir when she was in high school. Their graduation song was “Time in a Bottle.”  So of course someone decided they should sing it again. 

I guess that was the highlight of the evening: Five or six older women together at twilight and singing the song that had sent them out into the world 50 years earlier. To me, it was kind of beautiful.  By then I had examined some of their photos in the class yearbook, and they were all kind of beautiful too. And here they were singing again, a lifetime later. Time can't be contained, but we carry on as best we can. 

The sun was down and I didn’t need sunglasses, but I kept them on anyway. I got misty-eyed during that song. I preferred that no one notice. It’s one thing being old, another being an old fool. Who cries at someone else’s reunion? Not this cowboy.