reunions

I attended a reunion of the Naples (FL) High School Class of 1964 last weekend. There are more exciting things to do than be a spouse at a reunion of any kind, but this was sorta interesting because the "whatever happened to __" and "do you remember the time we __" chit-chat sounded exactly like what happens at my class's reunions (Clearwater High, Class of 1962, "the last of the great ones"). Some people don't find reunions worthwhile. They leave and never go back, and that's OK, but they miss the experience of seeing what time has done to their classmates. The old cliques have dissolved. The homecoming queen weighs 200 pounds and the football jocks are fat and bald. Nobody can find the address for the kid everbody thought would be the most likely to succeed. The girl nobody dated walks in looking like a million bucks and the guys slap their foreheads, saying wow, look what I've missed.

We did have one unique experience in Naples last weekend: The girl everybody concedes was the most popular girl in the class was incarcerated years ago for killing her husband. The details were extremely murky, but the story was that she was "railroaded." Last weekend, we learned that she was free after serving three years, and she is now married to the lawyer who got her out of jail. Somebody had her phone number and a dozen or so of her classmates spoke with her at her new home out West. I met the lady in college and she's a beauty, not a razor-totin' woman likely to kill anybody. This is the modern version of the knight (a lawyer in this case) riding up to the castle, slaying the dragon, and rescuing the damsel from captivity. Stories don't get much better than that.