Fiftieth High School Reunion: Lodi Union High School Class of 1968

Entry for 28 August 2018:

In order to attend my fiftieth High School Reunion, we delayed our return to Scotland for this year’s annual late August running of Strathclyde’s Emotion-Focusing Therapy Level 1 training.  Now, on our way back, I’m still thinking about What It All Means.  

To prepare, I spent part of a day reviewing the 1968 Tokay, the Lodi Union High School (LUHS) Yearbook.  I looked through pages and pages of coverage of sports, social events, and arts performances, finding my 17-year old self missing in action. I remember feeling that these activities had nothing to do with me, nor me with them. I remember feeling pretty socially anxious a lot of the time, and not very good about myself.  Oh, there I was, popping up in a couple of places: chess club, literary magazine, minor academic honours. So I studied (but not super hard), read a lot of books, and had a few extracurricular activities to show for myself.  Oh, yes, and I did a few things that took me completely out of my comfort zone: I took a public speaking course, went to some speech tournaments, and ran for Senior Class President, which involved giving a speech (fortunately, I lost).  I remembered how terrifying these latter activities were. 

Then, I went through everybody in my senior class, pages full of rows and rows of names and photos of scrubbed and coiffed 17-year olds, with their ties or single-pearl necklaces, some 700 in all.  I spent 13 years in the Lodi public school system, kindergarten to 12^th grade, and so crossed paths with hundreds of fellow students during that time.  Who did I still remember? Who would I recognise at the Reunion?  It was a big school, made of many overlapping subcommunities.  A surprising number, at least a hundred, were met with a sense of recognition of name or face, something in my body answering, “Yes, I knew this person”.  Some were friends or folks I hung out with, associated with specific memories, others were simply people that I knew I had known, faces seen, names heard again and again in attendance roll call, echoing in my memory.  Human facial memory is a wonderful thing, but name recognition is pretty good as well.

After that I read through the hand-written notes from friends and acquaintances, which filled the opening and closing pages of the yearbook.  My best friend Philip Frey (who died two years ago) was there, reflecting on our moderating influence on each other.  He’s a person I would certainly like to sit down and talk to now.  Several people commented on the speech I’d given when I ran for Senior Class President.  I had remembered this as an excruciating experience, probably better off forgotten, but the comments were positive, which surprised me.

We arrived a bit after 6pm at the Woodbridge Golf & Country Club.  I’d spent a lot of time there as a kid, caddying for my dad and at the swimming pool.  Parts looked somewhat familiar, but most of it was completely unfamiliar, since it has been completely rebuilt.  There were a lot of 68-year-old people whom I didn’t recognise, plus a mixture of spouses from elsewhere to confuse things further.  We were issued with name tags with our senior yearbook photos on them.  That helped.  We ran into my old friend Sam Hatch, whom we’d had a visit from 18 months ago when we first arrived in Pleasanton; he introduced us to his wife Susan and we had a great time visiting with them.  I also ran into several people I’d known from Saint John the Baptist Episcopal Church: Carol Gerard, Cindy Chappell, and others from various phases.

The reunion was very well-organised, with many nice features such as a free photo booth, prizes and so on, but two things really caught my attention: First, there was a set of class photographs from the LUHS’s elementary and junior high school feeder schools, so that many of us could see ourselves at even earlier stages. There I was, from kindergarten to third grade, in my plaid shirts and buck teeth.  Diane had trouble seeing the resemblance but I recognised me.

Second, there was a board of about 20 people known to the organisers to have died, a sombre reminder of how much had passed and what we had lost.  This was obviously a difficult thing to put together, and a thankless task.  The loss was only underscored by the fact that no one, myself included, had let anyone on the committee know that Philip Frey (one of the valedictorians) and Margaret (Linstrom) Weitzel had passed.  These were my two best friends from high school, and I still feel their loss keenly.  A 50^th high school reunion is obviously a time for celebrating accomplishments, remembering good times, and renewing friendships, but it is also a time to acknowledge losses: youth and naïve enthusiasm, of hang-ups and pretensions, of opportunities and hopes, and of people loved and lost.  It is a kind of Memorial Day, of smiling through tears, of marking lives spent in the best way we knew how, of celebrating what has been and resolving to do our best with what remains of our lives: For us, the living, the best thing is to take each day as a gift, and each person met and then met again also as a special kind of gift.

Vale, LUHS Class of 1968!

-->