*This post is actually a reprint from posts I made back in the early Summer of 2003 which have been combined into one longer piece.

Expectations of My Ten-Year Reunion

It’s supposedly a milestone in one’s life. In the John Mayer song No Such Thing he sings:

I want to run through the halls of my high school.
I want to scream at the top of my lungs.
I just found out there’s no such thing as the real world,
It’s just a lie we’ve got to rise above
I just can’t wait for my ten-year reunion
I’m gonna bust down those double doors.
And when I’m standing on the table before you,
You’ll find out what all this time was for.

And that, I think, is what we would all like—to be able to walk in to that banquet room in the Marriott and have our decade of accomplishments stream out behind us as silent and obvious as the ribbons on the handlebars of a little girl’s bicycle flying down the hill on West Chester Road. And some of us will. Most of us will most likely schmooze and smile and laugh and toast and show pictures of our kids and talk about our houses or the horror stories and epiphanies of the travels we’ve made. We shouldn’t talk about politics, but probably will once a couple of drinks have settled into the collective bloodstream. People who used to laugh at the fat Rush Limbaugh when he was on television the year we graduated now listen to him daily with religious solemnity. And some of us who shouted “Eff tha police,” are now thinking about running for office. What’s the old saying, “If you’re not a liberal by the time you’re twenty, you’ve got no heart. But if you’re not conservative by the time that you’re thirty, you’ve got no brain?”

Four years that began with words like wigger and ended with phrases like "Just Let it Ride" are such a small of part of who we were and, more importantly, who we now are. The temptation will be to sell ourselves to each other two weeks from Saturday, but I would like to warn myself against it. Not many of us walked around unmasked and our high school days were so innocent in the pre-Columbine era that the idea of someone packing heat in the classroom is laughable even now. Let’s not make this an auction block of pulchritude; we should all bust down those double doors and if some of us want to stand on those tables, there are others of us that will toast them and laugh as they are carried from the room cursing. I’ve given enough stoned sermons in the rain to know when to speak and when not to; it’s all about targeting the audience, you dig?

But there are a few observational rituals that should be performed:

• There’s a video yearbook that’s bound to be projected onto a large screen, embarrassing those of us who’ve put on twenty pounds in the last ten years (although my wife says I wear it well, like Anthony Michael Hall in his USA show The Dead Zone).
  

• The specter of those two state basketball championships will still have a gossamer hold in our minds as the two greatest basketball games ever played before our eyes, one of them teaching us the painful experience of loss and the other the glorious high of victory.
  

• And what about the lunch boycott that we all thought was going to change the world? Packing my lunch was as alien to me then as holding the baby that now sits rested against my chest as I type this would have seemed to the 17 year old young Minton. Now I pack my lunch every day—take that Mr. Craig Ullery with your evil syndicate lunch cartel. I’m still stickin’ it to you with every spread of mayonnaise I make.
  

• Or maybe we should play a "Get to Know You Again Game" like the old under the chin orange pass. That might allow some of us to fulfill our entire ill sated chin to high school breast (aged 10 years) fantasies; but then again, our wives and husbands might not appreciate such emotional and physical fulfillment.

In the end, I suppose we shall each bring our own expectations or lack of them with us as we walk into that banquet hall. Some of us will lug the same chips on our shoulders that we had ten years ago, the same only heavier like Jacob Marley’s chains forged link-by-link, year-by-year, and minute-by-minute. Others will float in with no cares and no responsibilities.

Personally, I’m looking forward to closing this chapter in my life. Sometimes I try to step back from the immediacy of life as myself and think about where I would be in an hour-long episode of my Biography on A&E (yes, I’m that audacious and grow more so with age). I figure that I’m working on about 15 minutes in, with commercials. There’s not much to say yet, except I miss seeing everyone, look forward to seeing them again in a couple weeks and look even more forward to hearing about your accomplishments in the future (failures never seem to be reported with the same efficiency and almost never appear in obituaries, so pardon my lack of concern with the downfall of others).

If my life were a biography that began with “I was born,” like David Copperfield, then this would be Chapter 3, a chapter that began with my thumb on the keg hose flip, gravity bong hits, careless encounters of the flesh with the inevitable next day residue of guilt and spent satisfaction, and fraternity hazing with me crying out the Founding Fathers names until my voice gave and tears stung my eyes like Isopropyl alcohol. The chapter ends in a monogamous relationship that has lasted longer than Jr. High and High School combined, an infant son who looks more and more like me every day, a new home with a 5%, 30 year fixed rate mortgage, 401K statements, a closer relationship with my parents and my parents-in-law than I ever thought would be possible, and my writing skills sharpened and heated into adamantium claw butane torches that slash and burn like Sherman through Atlanta.

The first sentence of the last paragraph of Chapter 3 will read, “I walked into the banquet hall with the dizzy ambulation of a surgery patient who has slipped away from the operating table still under the effects of anesthesia.” And the last line will read, “I walked out with a smile on my face, waving a salute to everyone I saw, missing them already and looking forward to facing the future that tomorrow only brings at crossroad moments such as this. Scarlet O’Hara, eat your Southern Belle heart out.”

Well, I’ll see you all there and don’t expect me to stand on tables or be this charming in person; the best writers are good liars before they are good human beings.


Reflections on My High School Ten-Year Reunion

It went great. Better than great, it was life affirming (now I sound like Maya Angelou, let me stop). But seriously, it was everything I hoped it would be and if you'll let me take you through the literary equivalent of a Springsteen song, I'll tell you why. Rip the sleeves off your thin T-shirt, snarl, and hum, "…Pass me by/In the wink of a young girl's eye/Glory Days…"

When I got there, I was hit with a sudden bout of shyness and decided to play the man on the side routine by sitting at a table out of the center of the action with my wife. We had a good conversation about adult things we hadn't been able to talk about since the boy came in May. But in between those fits of spousal laughter, I was watching you all, taking you in.

Man, you all looked great.

Almost the entire cast of my pubescent masturbatory fantasies was there, dolled up diamond divas, smiling and strutting around in full knowledge that they still had it. Old stories were exchanged, and usually talking incessantly of the past bores the shit out of me, but it was different. As people spoke, I could actually see the negative effects of a decade drain from their faces and we were all teenagers again. It was like the dance contest in Grease and my still flaring bout of shyness made me the nerd who dated Frenchie.

But I continued watched you all do your thing, man, still pros at schmoozing; it's an art I've never learned to turn on. With myself, when I am on, you can't stop me. When I'm on, I'm like magma oozing into Pompeii, destroying any semblance of decent civilization. But when I'm off, I'm shy like the naked white guy in a locker room of naked black football players. Sorry, gang; it was an off night for me. But I was able to catch your run-off and I became drunk with it (it was free, unlike the $4 beers).

Right before dinner, my buddy Lape came in and I have to tell you guys that there are few people in this world that I am closer to than Chris Lape. I could, at that point, feel the age slipping away from me also. Before I knew it, I was excited to be there. Hell, I even looked down Nicki Dracakis's shirt when she was bent over looking at a picture of my newborn baby. I was suddenly the same old sick and skinny asshole pervert I was at sixteen. It was good to be back.

I caught a picture of me with my senior year neophyte mohawk in the slideshow (Sorry, guys I couldn't even use the excuse of dope because that was before I started smoking it in college) and happened to look around the room and caught a flash; it was like a white wisp that was running through the crowd. Now, maybe I've been playing too many video games in the last ten years, but I know a Power-Up when I see one and this ghoulish wisp wasn't something malevolent. I didn't figure it out until later, but it was growth. True growth. I saw a decade of leadership in that room. I saw people laughing, smiling, and drinking, just like we used to. And dammit, it was sweet. If you could bottle that feeling and sell it, we'd all have profit share in the next Microsoft. But, like all great pleasure, there is the bitter flip side of the coin and it set in almost immediately as I kissed and hugged my good-byes.

I had a few disappointments that I will mention here:

1. No Kari Gerscheider. The girl had legs as long and mysterious as a backwoods Florida State route. She was always a sweetheart to me and I helped her pass Algebra (because she always wore those daisy dukes and gave the greatest panty shots I ever got as a teenager). I was really hoping to see how she turned out.
   

2. No John Foley. Foley and I had some good times. I would've liked to have seen him again and caught up.
   

3. No Sean Johnson. This kid said and did some of the stupidest shit that I laugh about to this day. Here are two classic Johnson stories:

   • When he faked falling off Courtney Smitha's trampoline and made like he had broken his neck, causing her babysitter ("Ashley Asshole") to go into a panic where he started guffawing and was promptly asked to leave the house.
     

   • Here is a discussion with Johnson in the car coming back from Midnight Bowling at Kenwood lanes. Me and Johnson were discussing the sexual habits of a famous couple in our class:
     
     Me: He fucks the shit out of her.
     
     Johnsons: No he doesn't.
     
     Me: Dude, I'm telling you; he fucks the shit of her.
     
     Johnson: Well, he doesn't fuck the shit out of her...
   
   
   

4. No members of the Black Enhancement Club. It was a very white affair, my friends, at least from what I saw. It's a shame that there weren't more people of color to help us meet the national quota recently set by the US Supreme Court. If there were people of color and I didn't see them, blame it on my hive-like bout of Wallflowerism.

I only said goodbye to a handful of people; this was because we had to leave early and assume our adult roles again, driving the 2 hours back up to Eastern Columbus to be with our son. But here's what I wished I could've done. I wished I would have had the courage and the inclination to walk up to each of you, hug you, put my palm to your faces and tell you that my world would not be the same without you in it, no matter how insignificant you think you were in my life. We could have never spoken and I still mean every word I just said. If someone were to unstring one of you out of the tapestry of my life, like some divine dressmaker who thought they had used the wrong color, it would be like someone removing Louis Armstrong from the history of American music. Everything would fall apart without you.

Hopefully, I've given you all a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. Hopefully, I've made some of the girls cry and wish they had slept with me ten years ago because I wish they did, too. I want to give a special thanks to Theresa Ruck (no hyphens in my world, sweetheart; we still live in a nomerical patriarchy), Nick Ruck, Jena Burns, Mike Burns, Courtney Woody, Will Woody, Brandae Ertel, Donna Kasten, Rina Patel, and anyone else who I have forgotten that helped plan this thing; you guys did a hell of a job and should be congratulated. Sorry if I messed up anyone's name; there's no spell check for old friends with new surnames.

I had a wonderful time and want to thank each of you who came for allowing me, one more time, to stand in your light. Now it's time for the rest of the world to stand in mine. Here's to conquering the Earth by the 15-Year reunion.

TAGS: Joshua Minton, Lakota High School