I got plenty of help making a fool of myself today at the reunion luncheon. The class president and the secretary both gave a little speech and I was the only person either one of them called by name. They each had a little story of what I did or said previous to the luncheon. I was set up to say something stupid to get attention. I said something equivalent to the notion that the only reason I came to the luncheon was to find out who had died since the last reunion, and then promised all the remaining high school class members that i was going to live longer than any of them. They tittered nervously. I guess I wasn't supposed to say something like that, but me an the one person I said it for might have been the only ones who noticed.
Several times I turned my head only to find some one staring at me with a pleasant look on their face. They seemed genuinely amused by my histrionics. Somehow I got the impression that the reason I was getting positive feedback from my classmates was because of the changes I've gone through in my life quest. Getting feedback on my own relationship with myself from this group that thought they knew me during my pubescent years seems fairly important to me. It might be hateful to say, but seeing that they got old too is rewarding.
There was this one woman I talked to for longer than I'd ever talked to her in my life. We had this fifteen minute conversation about her and how she had met her husband in college and knew right away she could build the kind of life she wanted with him. Her story was plausible, but not truly convincing.
I asked her what her astrology sign was, and she hedged of course to show that she was an educated church-going woman who never believed in the occult. But, when she told me she was an Aries and hinted that she was a conservative Republican I couldn't stop myself from encouraging her to tell me more, and then more.
The fact that she seemed so willing to tell me her life story proved to me once again that I was still living in a bubble of piteous lies I told myself to justify my teen-aged angst. I thought she was a different kind of person altogether, and was reticent to tell me what she was really like. I was totally wrong. This woman was sure of her own place in the world. Why am I always the last to know?
Another female classmate who was the class beauty queen was very friendly and came up to speak to me several times, and then sought me out before she left to say goodbye. She seemed happier than the last time I saw her. She told me about how she had maybe six grandchildren and her current husband has nine, in Scotland of all places, and she's having the time of her life commuting to Scotland and back and being a grandmother. Whatta woman. She was more convincing than ever before.
I got another perspective of this guy who became a veterinarian. The last reunion he talked to me (at me) for a good long time. He seemed to be trying to convince me of the positive influence my father had on him when we were in high school together. This is an old, old story with me. There must have been ten people say something to me to honor my father through me. It took a long time for me to let them do that and feel good about it.
I hadn't been able to understand the nature of the veterinarian for years during and after high school. It seems painful for him to seek my company out at these affairs. It's as though he has to express his gratitude for the interest my father took him, and he seems to be telling me I should have treated my father with the respect he had offered.
Today, however, something happened that brought some clarity into the nature of his character. The class president called on him to offer a prayer before we ate lunch, and the manner in which he was called upon for saying the blessing and his choice of rhetoric for saying the enchantment told me everything I needed to know to let him be.
This other guy that brought his memory of my father into the conversation I went outta my way to start with him, but he regretted it as soon as he realized the slight of tongue that betrayed his secret admiration.
He had been the star sportsman in our class. He was a really fast runner, and he could knock a baseball over the fence with some predictable regularity. He got scholarship offers in two sports. Just to make conversation I asked him if he had continue to teach school after he stopped coaching.
He did keep teaching, he said, and when I asked him what he majored in during his college career he told me he had majored in biology. I was a little surprised. I never realized he was a nerd.
He leaned back in his seat real confident-like, and said that my father had been the strongest influence on his choice of a major for college. Then, he realized what he said and corrected himself to say the biology teacher, a Mister Parsons, was his strongest influence.
For some reason, I suspect that his little slip-up was the first time he was consciously aware of how powerfully my father influenced him despite his refusal to take his classes in high school. He told some people he didn't take agriculture, even though he lived on a farm, because he didn't wanna end up being a hick.
Sometime I think people treat me as if I were my father instead of me being myself. I don't think they know it. Maybe it's not true. But, they talk about their relationship with my father as if I'm supposed to understand their need for me to play that role FOR them. It's not possible. My father was an honorable man. I can't even act that way, much less BE that way.
I think my talking about dead classmates was supposed to prove to them that I'm not my father. He was a Libra. He would never have been so crude or rude. I think they forgave me immediately because for some reason they need me to be my father for them. They also eat in blue plate special restaurants that serve heated can food like the school lunch programs to remind them of neverneverland. Life in a small town is just weird.
The one thing that pleases me at these sort of functions is that my mother didn't graduate from college and get her "A" teaching certificate until she was 48 years old, which was after I got out of high school. If she had taught at the same school I attended like my father did, then these reunions would require me to play the roles of both my father and mother simultaneously. As talented as I am is, it's not worthy.
