After 5 years, it was good to be home again
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- August 19, 2023
- 565
A week and 1,600 miles ago, I set forth on a journey into the past.
Now that it’s over, I think it’s important I write something.
Well, “important” may be a trifle on the “hey-look-at-me!” side of the professional journalism equation, the one that promises an even-handed — almost detached — evaluation of all that happened in exchange for informing a reader, who still wants to be entertained.
So with that tightrope ever so tenuously attached from one end of the trip back home for my high school reunion to other, let’s do it.
First, I was late to almost everything, up to and including the big event itself, specifically the class photo. This had been right at the top of my can’t-mess-it-up list, owing to the fact that when we last gathered five years ago, it wasn’t part of the celebration, which I considered something of a missed opportunity, not because it mattered all that much, but because I had on a killer necktie.
So, of course, the National Weather Service declared a tornado warning in effect until 9 p.m., and naturally, a twister touched down about 15 miles south of town, and organically, the skies chose to rain down fire and fury at the exact moment my wife and I were scurrying to the car, getting drenched and feeling under the gun.
The class photo was scheduled for a quarter to six, a fact that I had unfortunately forgotten until I called the class president, who no doubt had better things to do than good-shepherd a lost sheep.
And then — because this is the way life is when you’re me — I got so twisted up on the back roads and side streets that I missed the only turn I needed to make, which put us irrevocably out of luck.
Except that it didn’t, since my wife worked some voodoo with her phone and I was able to scramble inside with just seconds to spare.
And that was just one of a dozen adventures we shared, most of them wonderful — to a point — while others were not. This, I think, is the balancing act in a risk/reward enterprise like a 50th reunion. On its face it’s guaranteed to bring a series of smiles, but once you dig deeper into the marrow of life and death, you cut to the bone.
Therein lies the conundrum: If what you’re seeking is something beyond the mere superficiality of glad-handing and quick-hugging, if there’s a part of you that isn’t there for the cake but the broken eggs that helped make it, you must be ready to accept bad news.
It’s not my purpose or my place to betray confidences or make public what some friends and I discussed over those few hours spent together, all of us relishing the reality that it was kind of important to be breathing the same air with those who walked the same hallways, sat in the same classrooms during those key years.
But it’s safe for me to say, I hope, that some of us got to know each other a little better, despite the distances we’ve traveled, literally and figuratively, reaching a moment or two of trust.
That doesn’t mean it was all navel-staring confessionals or lost-love testimonials or even regrets that still carry some scars.
Not at all; in fact, the room was filled with amped-up laughter and songs we recalled and stories shared with those who were there.
That’s another essential ingredient, the sheer and unadulterated fun of listening as someone you hadn’t spoken with in decades remembered precisely an interlude you had never forgotten.
This, again, was a seesaw, up-and-down, give-and-take parley.
You had to understand your own memory could be faulty.
More than once during my time back in time, my brain regurgitated this line from the Eagles’ “Hotel California:”
Relax, said the night man, we are programmed to receive …
You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.
There are some people who read into that handful of words everything from the meaning of life itself to the definition of hell all the way up to and including God’s reason for allowing disco.
Serious scholars have earned their dissertations by analyzing the width and depth of that sentence, its echoes of poets past and present, the way it symbolizes sin and healing and even more sin.
I’m just a writer who gets by on his wits, someone who sits down once a week and a guy who doesn’t care all that much about the Eagles after, say, 1977. I had a conversation at the reunion with a good friend whose knowledge and passion for “our” music is even more informed than mine, and we got to talking about the biggest sell-outs in rock lore, the performers who scrapped art for money.
“The Eagles,” I said, without hesitation. “Very top of my list.”
He looked pained, as if I’d socked him in the solar plexus.
Still and all, I have to admit the line I quoted earlier, the one about the night man and the rest, retains a lot of resonance as the survivors of the Class of 1973 and I walk on down the road, looking forward to reunions yet to come, fully cognizant of the fact that 50 may be only a number, but it’s a pretty significant one.
So I’m glad I made the effort to see my hometown one more time and grateful to those who made it happen, even as the skies thundered and the lightning spiked, bringing us all together again.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or at 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. He invites you to join the fun at his Facebook page, where he’s still unpacking from his trip.