Spellcheck alert: I haven’t figured out an easy way to spell check when I use computers other than my own.
Twenty years ago I attended my last high school reunion. I’m prone to nostalgia. Claudia is not but she agreed to return to Mankato a couple months ago and we arranged to meet my fellow classmate, her brother from North Dakota, for old time’s sake. We also arranged for their father to visit us from Florida the day afterward. We will pick him up at the Airport in the Twin Cities this afternoon and he’ll spend his first week in Bismarck, North Dakota before we host him in Duluth. This will be his third summer in Duluth watching me fight the Red Plan. We have two cars so I’ll leave a little early today in one so that I can pay a brief private call on my Mother who lives close to the Airport.
It seems appropriate that I begin this short post on my reunion with the pressing plans of today because its never very useful to wallow in nostalgia. At best memories serve as a compass pointing us to some future destination. sitting here typing this in the AmericaInn lobby with Fox News blasting its All Obama bashing, All the time broadcast I’m reminded that Richard Nixon and his sins are long gone and its a new President’s turn to fend off the natering nabobs of negativism that are swarming after him.
Like Fox News my blog is its own world of natering as it dishes on the Red Plan. At least Lincoln Democrat isn’t owned by topless pic distributor Rupert Murdoch or run by a Roger Ailes a founding father of the GOP’s nasty school of politics. (But, honestly, if I have to hear one more story about Obama and Henry Gates I’m going to toss my AmericaInn waffles.)
Under the tent we hired Friday night I did better identifying my old classmates if I got to see them surrepticiously a few minutes before a handshake. Because our name tags sported our 40 year-old senior pics and dangled from our necks at chest level most of us got proficient with quick eye darts to the south before reintroducing ourselves. One of the fellows I enjoyed talking to the most was a fellow long suffering moderate Republican. He had worked Washington D.C. for one of the last moderate Republican Congressmen who was sabotaged out of Congress by Fox TV Repulbicans for not being a Limbaugh automaton.
I recall looking through at my annual in 1969 and thinking that I knew at least a little something about almost all of the 454 (a number which was subject to debate all night) graduates from Mankato High’s class of 1969. That was then. I had only the faintest impression of half those gathered this weekend. Many of the people I would have enjoyed seeing again didn’t show up. Forty had gone, according to the euphamism of the night, to the great reunion in the sky. About one-forth of the 400 still living traveled to Mankato for the weekend.
At ten AM the following day I went along on a tour of our high school now Mankato West. About 60 souls wandered the old halls for an hour and a half. The school was smaller than we remembered. Most noted how good the school looked. A fresh coat of scarlet paint brightened the the door jambs (Mankato’s teams compete as the “Scarlets”) The halls had attractive new tiles on its walls and shiny, new, blue lockers. I made a point of walking over to the bronze plaque commemorating its building and discovered that MHS was completed in 1950 the year I was born. Had it been in Duluth it would be subject to a razing. Instead the stingy people of Mankato were keeping the school in better condition than I recalled it being when it was twenty years old.
My party of three departed to drive around the City to see what changes had taken place. The street in front of my old home had been turned into a two-way. Housing tracks edged several miles into old corn fields. The College’s upper campus had become a mature, well landscaped institution with tall trees to soften the hard angles of its brick buildings. When I’d moved to Mankato 47 years earlier the upper campus was a mere collection of three or four buildings surrounded by nothing taller than a corn stalk. In time Mankato’s college will find itself hemmed in by the residential neighborhoods growing up around it just as UMD now is.
At last night’s memory lane dinner, in the renovated old strip club from my college days, I had one more chance to hobnob. For avid readers of my monomaniacal blog the conversation with the fellow from Faribault would be the most interesting to report. He’s a prominant Faribault resident today. He reminded me of something I had forgotten which he said was a highlight of his youth. In 1971 I was a summer intern in our local Congressman’s Congressional Office in Washtington D.C.
He had called me that summer because he was in nearby Baltimore and I eagerly offered to take him on a tour of the Capitol complex. Last night he told me that I’d gotten hold of a key that gained me admittance to every room in the Capitol and that I took him to the nooks and crannies of the capitol complex that mere mortals seldom saw. I’m sure it was a backstage tour alright but much of what I could show him would have been four or five stories below the Office buildings in the airless cooridors where a great many invisable grunts toiled. I don’t remember any magic keys.
Of course, I was curious to know what he thought of Faribault’s former Superintendent. My friend is a cautious sort but when I told him a bit about the past wo years he mentioned that if I ever visited Faribault he’d introduce me to his coffee circle where opinions about the old superintendent waxed strong. As a matter of fact, I plan to travel to Faribault to do a little research and I will take him up on his offer to return the favor of his capitol tour. I told him I also intended to find some fans of the superintendent too get a more balanced picture of the precedent he set there.
That conversation took place near the end of the evening and was more than enough for Claudia who could tell I was hashing out school politics. We bid my classmates adieu and drove to St. Peter, ten miles north on Highway 169, where we were staying to be a bit closer to the airport. This morning I awoke early to check on my email.
Welcome back to reality, Harry.
