'One Is Always at Home in One’s Past'

“I’m midwestern and agreeable,” writes Bert Stratton in “The Reunion That Didn’t Reunite.” Something to that. I work hard to resist generalities about groups of people, not because I wish to appear holier-than-thou and signal all the approved virtues but because it seems lazy and stupid. People are too slippery to be corralled. We may be sheep, according to some, but even sheep have misfits, eccentrics and malcontents. 

Stratton is a fellow Cleveland native, though he’s an East Sider and I’m from the West. That great divide used to mean something. Stratton is Jewish and roughly my age. When I was in school in the Sixties, I knew only two Jewish kids. Both were friends, both were female and smart, and both were enthusiastic readers, like me. I always had someone to talk to despite being an awkward klots. How’s that for a generality confirmed?

 

Stratton recounts his efforts to organize a mini-reunion of his high-school friends in 2020. He was the only member of his circle to remain in Cleveland, “flyover country” as he calls it. With all the plans in place, “Four guys finked out.” The reunion was a bust: “I just couldn’t wrangle my buddies to come back to the old sod.”

 

Before attending my fifty-first high school reunion in Cleveland last year, I tried to keep my expectations within limits. I didn’t want to set myself up for disappointment, and I parked my rental car so I could quickly split and drive back to my brother’s house, if need be. At the reunion, I felt more like a visiting anthropologist than a native. Most of my classmates had never left the Cleveland area. I haven’t lived there since 1977. I had several happy, even intimate conversations, which aren’t easy to conduct in the middle of a bash. The most emotional moment was meeting after half a century the first girl who ever kissed me. I even talked with three former teachers.

 

The reunion was humbling. I agree with Nabokov when he writes in Speak, Memory that “one is always at home in one’s past.” What I encountered in Cleveland, obviously, was not the past. I met a bunch of old people – some thoughtful and friendly; others vulgar and loud – whom I didn’t know. No regrets. Just a confirmation of what I already did know.

 

“Cleveland is all gone,” said David Thomas, another native Clevelander and founder of the band Pere Ubu, “but I'm like Saddam Hussein. I only trust people from my own village.”