Twenty Years

Twenty years ago, I graduated from high school.

It doesn't seem possible that it's been that long. Kids who graduated this summer weren't even born yet when I graduated.

That one girl who got pregnant in high school and was gone for a while to have the baby...? Her baby graduated a few years ago, most likely. She could be a grandmother now.

Doesn't seem possible. But it is. I'm going to my 20th high school reunion tomorrow night.

I'm trying not to have too many expectations and hopes for it. I was not part of the In Crowd, back then, though I was friends with some of them.

The thing is, I really enjoyed high school. I had my own group of friends, and we always had something happening. I have so many wonderful memories of that time: passing enough notes in various classes to fill an entire notebook (I still have that notebook, somewhere, in fact). Going to football games, and to Pizza Hut to celebrate after the game (almost always to celebrate, anyway -- we had the championship team). Going to the dances that the school held every other Saturday to hang out with friends (and make out with boyfriends). Wandering the halls during sixth period with my photography class partner and taking what I thought at the time were very artistic shots. Sneaking out of class to have balloons delivered to my boyfriend on his 18th birthday. That moment of awakening in Calculus class when Mrs. Gore led us to the notion and definition of the derivative, and the simple perfection of the math stunned me so hard that I couldn't talk for an hour afterwords, and I knew I was going to major in math in college. A similar moment in AP English, as Mr. Eaton disassembled "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" one word at a time, like pulling petals from a rose -- I had never realized that the English language could be so elegantly dense. My own first tentative steps as a writer, collaborating with friends on horrible stories that are probably better lost to the ages. Staying after school to scramble to finish the newspaper deadline. Terror and pride as I argued with the school principal -- entirely solo -- over the literary magazine's pitiful budget... and won (and subsequent hours spent slaving over the little magazine, trying to prove that it was justified). Dozens of sleepovers at my best friend's house, folded up at opposite ends of the couch with cokes and cheez doodles and books, trying to pretend I didn't have a crush on her brother. Pleading "female troubles" to get out of gym class so I could sit on the bleachers with my other best friend, passing a really horrible novel back and forth and giggling over the sex scenes (sometimes I wish I could get my hands on it again, just to see if it was really as shocking as I recall). The day school was canceled on account of a broken water main, and a bunch of us spontaneously packed up a cooler and went to the beach.

I could go on and on and on. I could fill a book with the vignettes and moments of those few years.

I don't know who's attending the reunion, or how many of them might remember me. I don't know how many of them will remember that I don't remember.

I admit to a little nervousness. It could go so well -- or so badly.

It can't change those memories, though.

Friendage

It was a busier weekend than I was expecting it to be.

Since I'd spent some time Friday asking her about the Wii Fit she's borrowing from another friend, KT invited us to come down on Saturday and give it a try. Matt wasn't really interested, but I was, so I left Matt with Alex and took Penny down with me.

It worked out really well. KT did a demo for me so I could see what it looked like, then they registered me on the machine and I got to try out a few exercises and games. Some of the games were extremely dorky, but they were still kind of fun. I did better than I'd expected to, which lends credence to the idea that it's more of a supplemental gadget, rather than something to set up as the core of my workout. Though I skipped the strength-building exercises completely, which looked a bit more challenging.

KT and I chatted while half-watching Kevin go through his routine, which gave me a more in-depth and advanced look at what's available (since KT hadn't really done a whole routine, just popped around a little by way of demo). And it was nice to sit and chat, too.

Penny declined to try the Wii, but she and Jess had a grand time together. They watched us on the Wii for a while -- Jess in particular was a great cheerleader. "Yay, you got a star!" After they got bored with that, they pretended they were dragons having a tea party (complete with growly voices and blowing fire all over us). Eventually, they disappeared into Jess's room, where they managed to play quietly enough (for a change) that we didn't fear for the building's stability, but not so quietly that we feared mischief. It was quite lovely, actually.

All in all, I'm pretty well sold on the Wii Fit -- now I just need to get one.

"I thought about getting it for you for Valentine's Day," Matt confessed later, "since you seemed so interested in it. But then I thought that's the kind of gift that could really send the wrong message."

I laughed. "Especially for Valentine's Day," I agreed. "'Happy Valentine's Day, honey! I love you! Now can you do something about your fat ass?'"

---

Sunday started out as the usual chore day, but while I was at the grocery store with Matt, he sent a beep that Jennie had called and would be dropping by.

Once I got home and got the groceries unloaded, I called her back: Jennie and her husband, pondering what to do with their day, had rather spontaneously decided to come down for a visit. Yay!

Jennie and I have one of those friendships that seems like it was destined and designed. We first met in the 7th grade: it was Jennie who decided that "Elizabeth" was entirely too cumbersome and didn't really suit me and that I should be "Liz". We were best friends for two and a half years, when her mother packed up and moved the family to South Carolina.

We stayed in touch, sporadically, through high school, then lost touch for college. Jennie found me again, out of the blue, shortly after I'd finished grad school, to ask me to be her bridesmaid. A couple of years later, she came to my wedding to deliver a toast...


...and stuck around long enough to help us move into our house.


We fell out of touch again for a while, though she turned up again just in time to celebrate Penny's birth.


Once again, we've been out of touch for a few years. Once in a while, Matt and I would try to contact them, but Jennie's email address had died. We spontaneously received a Christmas card from them this year, though, so I guess we're back in an "on" phase of our on-and-off relationship.

But every time we get back together, there's no catching up to do. Or at least, we fill in on what's happened, but we always seem to immediately understand who we are. Even when we've changed enormously over the intervening span. (Well, there are some gaps... Jennie is at least three inches taller than me, but she is forever frozen in my mind as the shorter of us, as she was when she moved away in 9th grade. It always surprises me slightly when I see her in person that she's the taller of us.)

She and Brian turned up yesterday and once again, we fell into chattering as if we'd seen each other only last week. She gushed over Alex and Penny (and Penny was immediately entranced) and we watched the video of the girl they're hoping to adopt, and we went out for lunch and had a wonderful time. I was hoping they'd stay for dinner as well, but they realized after lunch that they had to get home to let the dog out.

So, all in all, it was a simply marvelous weekend.

Concentration

William and Mary, being a good liberal arts school, had rules, when I was there, which tried to make sure all students got a "rounded" education. (I assume it still has rules along those lines, but I've heard they've changed since my day.)

At the time, they lumped all subjects into three categories -- Arts and Languages, Social Sciences, and Hard Sciences, to be generic about it. Along with various other requirements (Writing 101, at least 4 semesters of a language, at least one lab science, etc.) each student had to take a certain number of classes (well, credit hours) in each of the three categories. Your major, obviously, filled in most of the necessary hours for one of the categories, though they required at least two different subjects in each of the categories -- well-roundedness, and all. I used Computer Science to fill in my off-subject Hard Science classes, because my one Chemistry class convinced me I wasn't interested in pursuing that any longer.

Then they required you to take what they called a "concentration" in one of the other categories. It was about two classes shy of the credit hour requirements for a minor degree. And in the third category, you only had to take a handful of classes.

When I moved into my dorm room, my intention was to major in math (that had been my intention from somewhere around the first quarter of my senior year of high school, when I literally had my mind blown by my calculus teacher, and it was a drug I desperately wanted more of) and to take my "concentration" studies in English literature, to indulge my love of reading.

My throw-away category was to be the social sciences, which I had never really cared for, and learned to despise when I was in high school -- I am not good at rote memorization, and my history-major mother was forever disappointed in my barely-adequate grades. A perusal of the course catalog led me to Anthropology, which was at least new. Anthropology 101: Archaeology, and Anthropology 201: Cultural Anthropology, and Psych 101 for my "roundedness", and then I could focus on my math and my reading. An excellent plan.

So I showed up to sign up for my first semester of classes and found I had to stand in line for hours before even seeing the inside of the building. By the time I got to the Anthropology table, all the seats in both sections of Anth101 had been filled.

The person sitting at the table (a grad student, perhaps? I never knew, and now I don't even remember if it was a man or a woman) must have seen the disappointment on my face, and said, "Can I make a recommendation?"

"Sure."

"Try this course. Four-seventeen." They pointed to a line in the book: "Anth 417: African Experiences in the New World."

"But... I'm a freshman. I haven't had 101 or 201 yet!"

Shrug. "There's no prerequisite for it. And it's a visiting professor, and she's really great." I hesitated: 400-level classes were, at least in theory, for seniors. Could I handle that level of difficulty? "If you don't like it, you can always transfer out. Some spaces are bound to open up in 101 after the first couple of days."

So that's what I did.

Except I never did transfer out. It turned out to be a tiny class -- seven students (three of us white, two of us freshmen, and all of us female) and the professor, whose name I've long since forgotten, even though she completely changed my life.

It was not my first experience with education, distinct from memorization, but it was far more intense than anything I'd ever done before. We read five books, and they fascinated me so thoroughly that I'd devoured them before the first month of school was done. We studied culture, and the adaptation of culture. We walked into Colonial Williamsburg for a specialized version of the "Slave Life" tour. We wrote papers -- analyses of the books we'd read, and a free-study paper that I researched harder than I'd ever had to research anything in my life before (mine was on a comparison of voudoun and winti, tracing elements of each back to their parent religions in Africa). The black students in the class encouraged questions from the white students in the class about their own lives. We listened to music. At the culmination of the course, the professor had us all over to her apartment for a meal of authentic foods.

I fell in love with cultural anthropology that semester. I loved its elegance -- the way all the pieces fit together. It was exactly as mind-blowing as that moment in calculus had been, but meatier, more real. It made me understand how a person's surroundings affects their culture in a visceral way that seemed obvious, once it had been pointed out to me, and it made me look at my own culture with new eyes. It forever affected my writing, too, since I can no longer consider individuals as distinct from their cultural surroundings, and I feel the need to understand the cultural imperatives of each person or society before I can write about them -- and that has, I believe, given my characters a depth they never had before.

And these are the kinds of things that I think about when I don't have a talkative five-year-old in the car with me on the way to work, when I actually am allowed to have my own thoughts for half an hour or so, and when the radio plays "What A Wonderful World," which was analyzed by the other freshman in that class for her big paper, and which will always remind me that rhythm and spirit count for a lot more than people give them credit for... at least in our culture.