Prologue. My parents didn’t attend their high school reunions, My wife doesn’t. Three fourths of my living classmates from 1969 didn’t return. I did as I believe I have for the most of them ending in a 0.
Junior High wasn’t horrible but I was a new kid with a funny accent in the middle school years where all the grade school cliques pretty much kept me to myself. I was a tall gangling gymnast but even here I wasn’t that close to my fellow North Mankato Jr. High classmates. I was sent on an athletic bus with the swimmers who practiced at the high school pool while we gymnasts were sent to another junior high to make up a team large enough to field a team for dual meets. There was precisely one dual meet each year with the third junior high in Mankato which had a larger program.
So, when my parents moved out of their cracker box rental at the beginning of my tenth grade High School career suddenly I was plunged into a school with three merging junior highs and ample opportunity to break out of my rut.
High School gave me three delightful years and full scope to watch kids I liked and scrutinize them the my Mother always did. Those three years were a first chapter in lives that to this point have stretched out fifty additional years. I was eager to learn what had happened to these kids in the intervening years.
I stopped a little short of Mankato at the last place I had taken my Dad before he died in 1987. Its a county park called seven mile creek midway between Mankato and St. Peter. As I cruised in to stretch my legs and let my motel room open up I saw a large platoon of army reservists dressed for a drill. I left them behind to walk a mile up newly built trails with bridges spanning the creek. When I turned around to go back to finish of my drive I saw a reservist approaching. Her face was camouflaged and she held an assault rifle on both arms held out in front with a tall cup of coffee in her hand.
“I was a little worried when I saw you,” I joked as we crossed each other, “Until I saw the fast food.”
“Yeah,” she replied, “Its like we’re going to war with Dunkin Donut.”
I hadn’t been back for an overnight stay in Mankato since I brought my Mother’s ashes back in 2015. My parents were very much on my mind. After killing some time practicing French in the Hotel I hopped in the car for a quick drive past my old house which was purchased by a high school classmate when my Mom moved out to bravely become the artist she had wanted to be when she got married. My classmate was also one of the organizers of the reunion. I slowed down and looked at the handsome brick building in the dusk when a silhouette I didn’t recognize walked in front of the picture window. I waved and the silhouette waved back. Then Harley came to the door to cran his neck and see who it was spying on them from the other side of the street. His gimp from Vietnam gave him away. As soon as I called out who I was he ushered me into his home. It was populated by four of my former classmates. Including the older sister of my younger brother’s best friend and the Australian exchange student I was besotted with just before she flew back to Down Under.
Harley and Janet had kept my Mother’s vivid antique wallpaper on the walls for 35 years. It was uncanny to be back in such familiar surroundings. I got a tour of the house and a long hour of cordial reminiscences. Some of the chapters of my old classmates were being being filled in. More would follow over the four-day weekend.
I realize now that this proposed paean to American Public Schools was to be built on the chapters my friends filled in for me. I probably filled them in for at least thirty returnees. I can’t really do justice by all these stories but one thing stood out to me. We were like every other American public school’s special kids. We turned out pretty good despite troubling times spanned by the Vietnam war and punctuated by infamous assassinations. A lot of my classmates became teachers like me only much better ones with notable achievements. The thumbnails I could offer up are too threadbare to do justice to.
I was a pretty “sweet” kid according to the many goodbyes I read in my old Albums. I didn’t have a cunning bone in my body back then and I was a gentleman. Somehow in College I managed to date a number of the young ladies I’d known in high school and a lot of them were present for the reunion.
I will mention one of them as she approached me at the party staged a little later that evening. J walked over and told me she had a confession to offer me as she hung her head. The first thing that popped into my head was the fuzzy round whatzit with googly eyes and feet that another young lady had given me. Mankato High’s teams are called the “Scarlets” and I had brought my gift to school on a red and white themed day with a note about school spirit. J took an instant like to it and I’ve never forgotten how she took it from me saying she would keep it. It wasn’t hers. True, I had no particular use for it but it had been given me by someone I can no longer recall and I protested mildly that it wasn’t hers. But it was. Apparently, this theft had been on her conscience for fifty years. I gave J a hug and told her how charming I found her long overdue confession. Then for the rest of the evening I teased her mercilessly which was always guaranteed to end in her hanging her head and my giving her a reassuring hug.
J always seemed a little ditzy to me. But I reminded her how we both took an econ class in college together. She got an easy A and I struggled with all the math thrown at me to eke out a C. I told her what I suspected about her from that time on. That she was a master of looking silly in order not to sabotage the confidence of the innumerable men she met who could never measure up to her mental powers.
Over the next couple days I teased out that she had had a short unhappy marriage and the tragedy of a thalidomide-like damaged child born to her who had no hope of survival. She also had a pretty tough childhood with a Mother who was a drill sergeant. When her doctors recommended and helped her find and adopt an abandoned child she had so little experiences with children that she didn’t know that the child’s constant cries were not unusual. She just knew she had to take care of a child whom she later found out had been delivered by an alcoholic mother. She single-handedly raised the child who today is a model citizen and a considerable success in the business world. J was hardly a ditz and, to her credit, she had been plagued by a guilty conscience for fifty years over the slightest of larcenies.
