Editorial
Front Page - Friday, June 26, 2009
I Swear...
The reunion
Vic Fleming
Last week I said I’d write about the high school reunion. My 40th. Which I attended four weeks ago.
It was fun. More fun than I thought it would be. I had good enough catch-up visits with lots of folks I had not seen in years.
There was a gathering Friday night at the Greenville (Miss.) Country Club. At this gathering, among others with whom I visited was a certain woman, whom the muse is telling me to keep anonymous in this column. I will call her K and say that she is on her third marriage, which she says is working out great.
NOTE: At the 20-year reunion, K and C, a man who was in our class, showed up married to each other—second marriage for each. I remember learning at the 30-year reunion that K and C’s marriage had not stood the test of time, though I don’t recall how long they were together. (Stay with me, there is a point to these ramblings.)
So, K told me that her daughter had married a young man from Little Rock and, as we fleshed out his identity and lineage, it turned out that his parents are close friends of mine, his dad a long-time golfing bud. A nice coincidence, which I had overlooked a couple of years ago when these friends had told me of their son’s engagement.
My friends had not mentioned the Greenville connection, they may not have known about it. And the bride-to-be’s last name would have been no clue to me, etc.
So, anyhow, after my having this revelation with K on Friday night, on Saturday morning, I find myself playing golf with C, who is now in marriage no. 4 for him. It seems a legitimate area of conversation for me to tell him that his erstwhile stepdaughter has married a golfing buddy of mine’s son.
So, I broach the topic thusly: “Say, C, I was talking to one of your ex-wives last night.” For some reason, that struck everyone in the group as hilarious. Close friends of C, who see him frequently, which I do not, were dying laughing. C himself began to laugh, and, before I could get to the heart of my topic, C said, “Victor, you’re going to have to be a little more specific.”
The Saturday night event was cocktail hour, buffet dinner and dance: 6:30 p.m. to 1 a.m., and I can only assume some stayed till 1, as we were gone a couple of hours before that. But before we left, we got in a nice long visit with one of the other judges in the class—a federal magistrate in Oxford, Miss. She and I were co-editors of the high school literary magazine, but we did not talk of that.
It was nice. Folks behaved. And folks from different walks of the high school life partied together like they had not done 40 years earlier.
But all in all, it should be stressed that these were those who came: a hundred or so, of 300 who were eligible to come. Many were missed, having never responded to the solicitations, logged onto the Web site or done anything else to indicate that they cared at all about reconnecting in this way with these folk.
And that, too, is part of the story.
© 2009 Vic Fleming
|
|