Life — or Something Like It

This has been a very unusual week for me.

If you read my blog on a somewhat regular basis, you’ve probably read my entries about my 30th anniversary high school reunion, which was held in my hometown in central Arkansas last weekend. You also know I wasn’t able to attend the reunion.

But I feel as if I have attended — in a way. One of my classmates e-mailed a class web address to me, and another classmate e-mailed the contact list that was compiled at the reunion itself.

From the information I’ve picked up from those two sources, I’ve been able to send e-mails to several of my classmates, and I’ve heard back from some of them already.

I’m getting caught up on the news from some long lost friends — how many children they have, which ones are grandparents now, etc. It would have been great to see them (maybe someone will post some pictures!), but communicating with them really is the next best thing to being there, I guess.

Some of them have done me the honor of visiting this blog and reading what I’ve been writing lately. I guess they remember things I wrote for the high school newspaper — when I was young and wordy!

Well, I've got a news flash — I'm not young anymore! (But I can still be wordy at times.)

Anyway, I hope they enjoy what they read here. And I look forward to their input.

I haven’t seen many of my classmates since the fifth anniversary reunion in 1983. Obviously, a lot has happened in 25 years. For me, it’s almost as if it’s all happening now.

It’s kind of a strange sensation.

For example, I heard from one of my classmates who married another one of my classmates. They became parents for the first time 25 years ago. Offhand, I don’t remember if their baby had already been born or if they were still expecting him when I saw them in 1983 — but, in the years that have passed, they added three daughters to their family tree. Four children in all.

I just found out about all that this week — to me, it seems like their little family exploded overnight. But, like everything else, it was a product of time. I just wasn’t there to see it all happen.

Three of their children are in their 20s now — old enough to have graduated from the same high school their parents and I attended three decades ago — and my friends have one grandson.

I e-mailed a picture of my goddaughter to another old friend, and my friend e-mailed a photo of her three daughters to me. I remarked that one of her daughters bears a striking resemblance to her when she was a teenager.

Life’s rich pageant has been coming to me through my e-mail’s inbox this week.

I also learned this week that the mother of two of my classmates (who were my closest playmates in elementary school) passed away last year.

I don’t know much more than that. I don’t know if she had been ill prior to her death or if it was one of those things that happened suddenly. Judging from what I assume was her age when her sons and I were children, I guess she was in her late 70s.

But, in my mind’s eye, she’ll always be who she was when I was 7 or 8 years old and I had dinner at their house or spent the night. For however long I was in the house, she was my surrogate mother.

She was always very nice to me — she treated me like one of the family, and she expected me to follow the rules. I expected no less.

And, until this week, she was still alive in my mind’s eye — even though, in reality, she’s been gone for more than a year.

In a more immediate sense, I learned that an old friend of the family died this afternoon.

I don’t know what his cause of death was, but he was in his 80s and he had polio when he was a child so I suppose, under those circumstances, even something that might be handled routinely by a younger, healthy person could be too much for an older, compromised immune system.

But I’ve known this man all my life. In fact, there wasn’t a time when I didn’t know him. He and his wife were friends of my mother, originally, and they were there for our family in our darkest days. I’ll always be grateful for that, but I didn’t see much of him in the last year of his life. I think the last time I saw him was at Christmas.

But I will be attending his funeral on Monday.

Life marches on.