'My Past Where No One Knows Me'

Dana Gioia speaks for me, though he has another sort of reunion in mind: 

“This is my past where no one knows me.

These are my friends whom I can’t name—

Here in a field where no one chose me,

The faces older, the voices the same.”

 

Our fifty-fifth high-school reunion was held at the Cleveland Yachting Club, about as alien an environment as I can imagine. The guard at the front gate asked if I knew where to go. Had I been there before? “I didn’t come from a yachting family,” I explained. I entered a dining room full of strangers, “my friends whom I can’t name,” some of whom were classmates for thirteen years. Slowly I started recognizing a few people, or at least figured out who they were by reading name tags. Youth and old age are like foreign countries often suspending diplomatic relations.

 

The person I most hoped would attend walked in. I wrote about Lynn Kilbane four years ago after our previous reunion. She has retired after forty-five years as a registered nurse and lives in Cincinnati. We resumed that earlier conversation, and Lynn answered questions that had puzzled me for decades. A guy I had known since kindergarten, Norm Kuhar, died in 1974, just four years after we graduated. Vietnam, drugs, cancer? Lynn told me he committed suicide. Louise Koch died in 1972 of an undiagnosed blood disease. These are people whose images I carry in memory. I would recognize them, or at least their younger selves, if they walked in the room. From Lynn, after sixty-four years, I got a second kiss.

 

“Must I at last solve my confusion,

Or is confusion all I can feel?”