Old timers

Last weekend I traveled to my hometown to reunite with two of my very oldest friends, Tamara and Crystal. We were thick as thieves in high school (with bouts of adolescent spattiness throughout our friendships, of course), and then went our separate ways after graduation. Tamara and I — with the exception of some months of no communication because we are sometimes stubborn, foolish girls — have mostly kept in constant contact, but I lost touch with Crystal. The three of us got together in Alabama back in … 2003? My memory is bad. But that was the last time we all hung out. Until last weekend.

I’d like to be able to say it was just like old times, and I guess in some ways it was, but it was incredible how much we all had changed. And not just the way we’d changed, but the ways in which the very worlds around us had changed and changed us. Our families have expanded and contracted, often simultaneously. We’ve had to confront the mortality and vulnerability of our parents and our own bodies. We are no longer invincible, and we know it.

It is always so interesting getting with your oldest friends and telling old stories. They remember what I’ve forgotten and I remember what they don’t. Except some things they remember seem so improbable to me (Crystal said she remembered being at my house the night Princess Diana was killed, and how we’d spent time at my grandmother’s house, trying to sneak cigarettes; I would have DIED of stress overload trying to smoke around my house or my grandmother’s house), and really prove that memories are just stories we console ourselves with. What I think I know about myself — or anyone else — is not necessarily what’s true. (Yes, please do insert “what is truth?” tangent here.)

Crystal brought along another of our classmates, Tim, who showed us pictures and video on his phone of his two kids. These are not tiny baby children; he is a proud pop of a little girl who is old enough to know all the dance moves to some popular song I’ve never heard but who is still too naive to realize her dad is making a video of her on his phone that will embarrass her for the rest of her life, if he thinks to put it on a disc. It is not quite right to think of anyone I went to school with as being in charge of anyone else’s tiny life, but as I coast into my thirties (and Facebookstalk everyone from HCHS who friends me), I’m willing to bet that my and Tamara’s and Crystal’s childfree status puts us firmly in the minority. I’m taking bets on which one of us will end up knocked up first.

“Are y’all going to the reunion?” Crystal asked us. Without hesitation, a chorus of “uh, no” erupted from all mouths in the room. Although, I’ll admit, I’m conflicted. There are some people I really would like to catch up with. I do still get a little sick to my stomach when I think about high school, but I wonder if I’ve not grown up enough to be over most of that by now. It wasn’t all that bad, was it? I imagine the sickness I feel is actually shame over how I acted in high school. I was a wet blanket — a stone-faced high-horsin’ bitch a lot of the time, partially as a function of what was back then clearly some serious social anxiety. I’m terrified that I will never be forgiven for that, the way that I still have not quite forgiven some people for being who they were in high school too.

Whew. High school. What a country.

I want to get up to Buffalo to visit Tamara this winter. Yes, that’s insane, I know. But that’s when I’ll have time off and, well, winter is just around the corner, don’t you know, and if I am going to truly experience her chosen home for its charms, I think in the middle of a backbreaking snow storm would be the perfect way to do it. I hope the manfriend isn’t sick of me by then, so we can both go and he can go see his beloved Bills lose in person. Heh.