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Section: Life & Leisure

Voted Most Likely to Show Up
By Ted Rickard

By the time of his 25th class reunion, a fellow has learned two things: (1) Good Lord, I am middle aged! (2) This might be as good as it is ever going to get!

Either realization is enough to make a grown man go out and buy a Harley, or simply pull up the covers and play possum for a week. By the time of the 50th reunion, however, I have learned that (1) I have no idea how to get a motorcycle started, and, (2) my wife wants to make the bed and go shopping.

In honor of your—of whatever year—you can bet “the old school is putting on a full-court press,” as the basketball coach says in one of the fund-raising letters. Enclosed in a glossy brochure with an architect’s drawing of an enormous concrete box building—one that looks like a maximum security institution with little green trees sketched in front of it. The final mailing encloses a key ring and plastic “key to the old school—to commemorate this once-in-a-lifetime event.”

Then come the phone calls from good old Charlie Bruderbinder of the Fellowship Committee, who apparently has me as his personal assignment. The message tape handles Good Old Charlie, until one day, not recognizing the phone number on caller ID and thinking it’s the call-back from the proctologist with the test results, I answer the phone and get caught.

Charlie mispronounces my name repeatedly with the enthusiasm of a TV carpet salesman and finally I can recall him, if only vaguely, as a bent figure in a column of smoke in one corner of the chemistry lab. But his puppy-like delight at the prospect of getting together with me once again “after all these years” is hard to meet with surliness. And there just may have been more to our relationship than I can recall so many years later. That’s how a man ends up, with spouse in tow, at his class reunion.

On site, the first thought that hits is that I should have rented a car—an expensive new one, preferably German—for the occasion. I suspect that’s what about half of the rest of the class did. It might just be sour grapes, but I don’t see how all of my classmates could be that well-to-do. Even as churlishness surfaces however, a tiny voice saying “oh, couldn’t they?” begins to creep into the darker recesses of my mind.

Arrival ceremonies at the class reunion are but a single step removed from funny hats at the corporation Christmas party. But its very awkwardness makes me stop thinking about the parking lot as I fill my name badge and class year, and do the same for my spouse, noticing that she has her game face on. It’s the face she wore at the funeral for an uncle with a drinking problem and three marriages. I whisper “I owe you one” and she nods yes.

School reunions would end within 15 minutes without the bar. Whatever you might have to say to somebody you haven’t seen for years since your own and his gangling youth can be said in about one minute. This results in a lot of walking around trying to find another familiar face and becoming more and more conscious of how cruelly time can treat physiognomy, to say nothing of what it does to the human silhouette. It’s going to take a lot of social lubricant to handle this.

There is an awkward moment when an enormous buxom blonde woman—who has either had too much to drink or whose contact lenses are smeared—throws herself around me mistaking me for good old Buddy Burke who, as a classmate, had a Buick convertible and behaved towards her apparently dishonorably but delightfully so, in her sophomore year. The mix-up takes some straightening out in a too-voluble explanation to the blonde, and to the spouse who now has a rather nervy look about her. It’s hard to explain that you are really not somebody else. I find myself prattling on with a wordiness that simply leads to deepening suspicion that I am lying for dark reasons of my own—and I begin to suspect rather frantically that the suspicion is now being shared by both women.

There’s nothing to do but stumble toward the bar, half hearing my wife grate “such a pleasure to meet you” behind me as I do so. Turning to her but not quite daring to meet her eyes, I see the buxom blonde, splashing her highball in a wide gesture of greeting, putting arms around another classmate whom, I can only assume, also looks like Buddy Burke. But I don’t think Buddy Burke ever did show up at our reunion. And I’m not so sure he was in our class, anyway.


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