'Let Us Seek Them There in the Shadows'

I bought my ticket and was prepared to fly to Cleveland for my fiftieth high-school reunion in September until the pandemic scuttled those plans. The committee of former classmates who organized the event maintain an updated list of those who planned to attend, and I looked forward to seeing many of them for the first time in half a century. That has been postponed for at least another year.

This week, the committee sent out another list --  “classmates whom we have unfortunately lost over the years.” At first I found the gesture morbid. But after reading the spread sheet of eighty-one names and the years of death, I think it was a thoughtful idea. It was a big class and most died in the last decade. I recognize fourteen names. I was close, or as close as an awkwardly backward adolescent can be, to several of them.

Ron Hegedus lived a few blocks away from me. We often walked home together. He was even goofier than me.

Dave Herene sat next to me in creative writing. He was the first person I knew who had a cornea transplant.  

Mario Lombardo – his was the first Italian family to move into our neighborhood. He always wore a clean white t-shirt to school. I remember talking to him at the graduation ceremony.

Linda Phillips – we were in a play together in grade school. Something about Switzerland, and I was a cheesemaker. One of many crushes.

Abigail Sheldon – smart and pretty. Her father, Linn Sheldon, was Barnaby, host of a television show in Cleveland for kids. He played Popeye cartoons. I grew up watching him.

Only one name on the list shocked me: Norm Kuhar. I knew him from kindergarten on, but he was like wallpaper -- always there but seldom noticed. In a neighborhood of dark-haired people, his hair was emphatically blond. His year of death: 1971, the year after we graduated.  What happened? Dope? Car crash? Vietnam? It’s Norm who makes me think of Donald Justice’s “On the Death of Friends in Childhood” (The Summer Anniversaries, 1960):

“We shall not ever meet them bearded in heaven,

Nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell;

If anywhere, in the deserted schoolyard at twilight,

Forming a ring, perhaps, or joining hands

In games whose very names we have forgotten.

Come, memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.”