Margit’s Note: Don’t You (Forget About Me)

Images from Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (Collage: Nancy Gonzalez/TueNight.com)

We relate to people through certain time chunks in our lives — the high school chunk, the college chunk, that first job, the second, the time we moved to Chicago, the time we moved back. We have all these various “eras” that include different friends, favorite haunts, routes we drove, routines we’ve long since replaced, various versions of ourselves. Facebook has kept some of us in touch, blending our eras into one big slush pile of pals, but in-person reunions truly take us back.

“Remember when Louis did that lawn job in Elliot’s front yard?”

“Holy shit, yes. He had some crazy car.”

“He had a Camaro!”

I hadn’t seen or talked to Luke or Emily or Mana or Mark in 30 years but here we were conjuring up 30-year-old memories at our high school reunion. How short we (girls) hemmed our school kilts, terror-inspiring teachers, the nice ones, too (Mrs. Allen!), walking to school across the golf course, smoking clove cigarettes in the parking lot.

“Wait, didn’t you hook up with him?” Thirty years on, some things are a bit of a blur.

Reunions connect us to a fixed time and place. The setting is the same though some of us are nearly unrecognizable (especially the boys, what’s up with that?), and some are exactly the same. Brian still wearing his straw pork pie hat; Ruth dancing by herself on the dance floor; Betsy and Gigi yanking us onto the dance floor to join Ruth; Teresa snapping photos of it all.

Despite all of the things that have happened to us in those 30 years — marriage, divorce, birth, loss — we realize that we change, but then we don’t. We dip back into that early portrait of ourselves and poke around; some of it we like and some of it we loathe, but 30 years on, a comfort and ease sets in. We’re mostly ok with all of it.

This week we’re getting reacquainted:

Until next week (when we can reminisce about this week),

Margit

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