It came from 1987

I get a lot of email from Classmates.com, most of them breathlessly informing me that a someone from the past, usually not my past has updated their profile on the site. I don’t spend much time wondering what happened to The Class of 83 and as time passes. I don't really think much about the people from The Class of 87 either.

I should feel more curious about them; after all I went to school with some of them for 13 years. My graduating class had many of the same people I went to kindergarten with – all be it I graduated from a class of something in the neighborhood of 436 and my kindergarten class topped out at 18 – the rest of them went to my same Junior High and that still makes for six long years of enforced togetherness. These are people know entirely too much about each others puberty. There should be some law, written or unwritten forbidding them to ever have to speak to or be in the same space with each other again. .Oh, yeah, he’s hot now, but you should have seen him in 85! Whooo! Flock of Seagulls all the way! or Oh, yeah, she has great taste in music now, but back in 83? huge Men at Work fan!. Maybe if we could just get a gag order?

We spent some of the best Gawd No!, meaningful I don’t think so!,longest! years of our lives together – we watched each other get tits or not get tits, grow beards, fail to grow beards, change voices and learn about the fine art of camouflaging bad skin, bad hair, all while learning how not to properly use base – all this and living through the eighties! Without the benefits of hard drugs! Can you imagine spending the eighties and both Reagan terms sober? Those things bond you together.

The nice thing about graduating was not just that we had successfully navigated our childhoods together and made it to the other side – graduation meant we never had to see each other again! - Which sounded great at the time… Fast forward a few months and the idea of seeing a familiar face, even one of those faces would have seemed like heaven - 20,000 people and I don’t know any of them!? until we all releized with all those people blessedly far, far away we could transform ourselves from the person they knew into the person we wanted to be.

I got an email from 1987.

My classes’ foreign exchange student dropped me a line to ask if I remembered her.

I said “Of course I remember you! You were our foreign exchange student. And you cried when we lost homecoming that year”.

But that was all I remembered about her.

She asked about other people we went to school with and I came up with nothing. “I know about X,Y,Z but oh, wait! Robby Van Winkle was in our class and he turned into Vanilla Ice”.

She asked after this guy Doug, she went to the Homecoming Dance with and I couldn't place him, I needed more - "Third degree burns?, Oh, wait! Yeah. Did you go to Homecoming with him? Wow, his name was Doug?"

We emailed back and forth a few more times, she lives in the states now full time and said she'll be at our reunion next year. I didn’t even know we were having a reunion!

I checked with a friend and she says she hasn’t heard anything about a reunion, except she also takes for granted we’ll have one. We had a 5 year and a 10 year but skipped the 15. I guess we were busy.