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AT OUR FIFTIETH Urbana High School class reunion in the summer of 2010, I watched as every class member walked to the microphone and said a few words. I saw a double image: the same person in 1960 and 2010. The same smile, the same gait, the same body language, the same eyes. I was witnessing a truth. Within our bodies of sixty-seven or sixty-eight years lived all the people we had ever been or seemed to be.
That spring of 1960, when we graduated, John F. Kennedy was running for president, and there was change in the air. It was the beginning of something—a new decade, a new kind of freedom vaguely predicted by rock and roll. Many of our hopes were delusions. One of our class members would die as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. Another would die mysteriously fighting with the rebels in Nicaragua. At least one was lost to Alzheimer’s. Others to accidents and disease. Most got married, had children and grandchildren, and now those still alive were gathered at a new hotel located more or less where we used to pick strawberries for ten cents a quart on the university’s South Farms, passing around family photos on their cell phones.
This would probably be my last reunion. At our tenth reunion, held at the now-disappeared Moose Lodge in Champaign, there was still a little unfinished romantic business in the air. Twinges of old jealousies and heartbreaks. We noticed those who had once gone steady, the boy’s class ring worn on a chain around the girl’s neck, resting between her breasts in a gloat of possession. Now they had married others, but that night they took the dance floor together.
There had been little drinking in high school—none, in fact, that I ever saw. Or much smoking. At the Moose Lodge in 1970 a lot of us were smoking or drinking, and one classmate wanted to ride back to Urbana on top of my car. Here he was in 2010, one of the most respected men in Champaign County. But still—this is the point—still absolutely the same man, sober now but with the same sardonic grin, the same sideways amusement at life. Here were girls I dated and parked with in the moonlight to quote Thomas Wolfe on his trembling romantic destiny—his, and of course, ours. Then we kissed not so much in a sexual way as with the tender solemnity we thought of at the time as love. In 2010 that is all so long ago, but the same persons live inside, and while we live we have memories. Most of our memories are still in there somewhere, needing only a nudge to awaken. Here was Pegeen Linn, a girl who appeared with me in a class play. I hadn’t thought about that play once in all these years, but now into my mind came the memorized monologue. From where? From where everything still is.
I went to school with these people for four years. With those who attended St. Mary’s, for twelve. They evoke associations more fully than most of those I experienced later. One of the most noble undertakings in the history of the cinema is Michael Apted’s Up Series of documentaries, which begins with a group of British seven-year-olds, and revisits them every seven years, most recently in 2005 when they were forty-nine. The films are the proof of Wordsworth’s belief that “the child is father of the man.” Looking at my classmates, I wondered if perhaps the person we are in school is the person we will always be, despite everything else that comes our way. All that changes is that slowly we become more aware of what matters in life.
On the Saturday morning we took a bus tour around the twin cities. Down the leafy old streets we remembered as children, past our old houses, past Lorado Taft’s statue Lincoln the Lawyer, which faces the high school. We saw ghost buildings on every street and called out what used to be but was no more: the Elbow Room, the Urbana Lincoln Hotel, Mel Root’s all-night restaurant, the old Steak ’n Shake, Hood’s Drugs with its chocolate and marshmallow sundaes. We drove out into vast new “developments” rising from the farmland southeast of town, $500,000 homes surrounding a golf course, looking exactly like similar “developments” all over the nation and not at all like our Urbana neighborhoods.
We drove around the enormous campus, half the buildings new since our time, most of the old buildings still there. Past Memorial Stadium with ungainly sky boxes now surmounting the grandstands where rich and poor once froze alike. Past the Morrow Plots, the nation’s oldest agricultural research field; the Undergraduate Library next to it was buried five levels into the ground to avoid casting shade on it. Past the Assembly Hall, now threatened with obsolescence because it wasn’t large enough to accommodate the new scoreboards. The new scoreboards!
We passed the Taylor Thomas subdivision, named in honor of our history teacher, possibly the first African American to teach at Urbana High. In his civics class he taught me much of what I believe about politics. When he attempted to buy a house in a neighborhood mostly populated by professors at the university, the house was snatched up by a neighbor to keep him from moving in. He bought a lot just outside the city limits and built the home he and his wife occupied until he died. He never mentioned that in class.
Our sightseeing trip took us down a road through the university farms, where we once parked to make out. There in a cornfield, the university is building the new Blue Waters supercomputer. Our hometown, the birthplace of HAL 9000, would now give birth to a computer more powerful than the next five hundred largest supercomputers combined, operating at a quadrillion instructions per second.
Incredibly, four of our teachers were at the reunion. Here was Dan Perrino, our bandmaster and music teacher. Paul Smith, who told me I was one of his best physics students, although that’s not how I recall it. Carolyn Conrad, who inspired me in English and drama. The poetic Carolyn Leseur, who turned me on to Charles Dickens for a lifetime, and who told Chaz I was always reading a book during class. Here was John Rasmussen, whose house I stopped at many mornings before grade school, so we and his sister Jeanne and brother Jerry could ride there together on our bikes. Here was this year’s emcee, Dick James, the best-selling psychologist, who has probably forgotten he once threw a hard-packed snowball that gave me a black eye, but I haven’t.
There were many women in the room I’d dated in that naïve time. I noticed all evening classmates smiled at one another in a subtly different way if they had reason to remember private tenderness. Marty McCloy wasn’t there because she was Class of 1961, but somehow high school romance for me is evoked by the two of us on a hot summer night on the dance floor of the Tigers’ Den, holding each other closely, very serious and inward of mind, while the Everly Brothers played “Dream.” Under our armpits, sweat formed dark circles, and our cheeks were moist as they touched. Many years later Marty posted a comment on my blog saying I was the best kisser in school. Why don’t we ever learn these things when they could do us some good?