Damn, We Got Old!

The Shawnee Mission North class of 1988 had its reunion this weekend. Well, the ten percent or so of the class that showed up.



Among the missing in action were some people I really wanted to find out about. The girl I dated for two three-month stints in high school who, last I heard, married some guy from Brazil and moved there. Or the chick who's Dad I ran into a few years back who told me she was living in Germany. See also the girl who couldn't make it because she's busy living in London.



I suppose London, Sao Paulo and Berlin are pretty expensive airplane rides.



The people who did show up had done about what you'd expect with their lives. Well, sometimes. Our class president turned to prostitution and car theft and only recently got paroled. The vice president was acquitted of killing her first two husbands, and will soon go on trial as a 'black widow' in the death of her third. And the class treasurer turned state's witness in the Enron trial to avoid fraud charges.



Not really. They're all three obscenely accomplished career women, an attorney, anesthesiologist and accountant respectively. The attorney quit lawyering to be an obviously great Mom to three boys, the doctor is moving to Hawaii with the guy she's about to marry, etc. Anyone could have told you when they were seventeen that these chicks would succeed at anything they set out to do, and they've done it.



A girl I swore hated me in high school shocked me. She was tight with a girl I hung out with some, and when we were in each other's company back then, I thought she was barley tolerating me, so when she looked at my name tag and exclaimed that she adored me and read my blog, I was about as shocked as I'd be if Beth really was a car-thief and hooker.





Apparently my not-shyness and her shyness in high school were really the barrier. She turns out to be a delightful woman, happily married to an impossibly lucky dude with three kids, too. And while she was attractive in high school, and I even crushed on her a bit back then, she truthfully looks better than ever.



Which gets to the outrage of a 20 year reunion. Most of us don't look better than ever. A few have managed to avoid the pitfalls of middle age better than others, some could pass for ten years younger than I know they are. But they're offset by the ones who don't have a Dorian Gray portrait to eat up their vices: me, for instance.



With most of the people I remembered, they look exactly the same except they don't. They're caricatures of the kids I knew. I am too, so I don't know what else I'd expect, but take away my heel spur that won't quite clear up, chronic back pain, and a hundred pounds and I still feel pretty much like I did when I was 18.



Except we've all been run over by the bus that is two decades. Divorces, bankruptcies, downsizing, outsourcing, disease, loss of parents, addictions, these things have probably left nobody unscathed.



Well, there's the chick who remembered nobody, and nobody remembered her until they saw her picture on the name tag from back then. Victoria's Secret and the Ford Agency missed out with this one. Even our gay classmates affirmed she was hotter than hell even if she's pushing 40. She didn't know anyone because she did no extracurriculars and tested out of a lot of stuff to graduate early.



Though some things never change. The girl who was an inevitable life of the party, especially if the booze was flowing, well she still is. And despite that, she's one of the few that seems to have largely dodged the bullet of aging.



Though so has the girl I first met trying to look down her shirt while she played Space Invaders at the roller rink the summer before seventh grade. A girl I later humiliated by proposing to her on bended knee in the junior high cafeteria, claiming I loved her and wanted to have her baby.

To her credit or shame, she will still talk to me. Her hubby is also one very lucky SOB. She looks older than she did at eighteen, don't get me wrong. She couldn't pass for a day under 22.



I really appreciate the honesty text I got from one guy who asked if I remembered him as if I really should. I'd read his name tag, but I had to say, apologetically, Sorry man. Don't even think your name rings a bell.

Which is because he didn't go to school with me, he only married someone who did. And I'll bet he got at least ten people who pretended they remembered him from back then.



But then again, there was a chick I kept trying to place, she looked so familiar. Even instinctively posed with the class pres when I pointed my camera at them, who didn't even go to high school in the same state.



She sure as shit looks like someone I went to school with, though.