The More Things Change ...

the more they stay the same.

It took almost exactly 3 hours to make the drive early this morning as the traffic was light and moving very fast. I joined the pack and Nascar-ed it with the rest of the road racers. Arrived in time to stop at my family home to say hello, and then all the "girls" went out for b'fast before I had to get to the park. The girls have grown so much and are all beautiful, talented, polite, and totally competent to take on the world and win: my kind of women! Their mom looks wonderful, no longer wearing the stress, verbal abuse, and depression my mother heaped on her daily for the first 15 years of her marriage to my youngest brother. As a matter of fact, she looks younger, happier, and thinner, too. Rest in peace, Mom.

After sharing a girls' group hug, I drove to the park and found the reunion site, staked out with a half-dozen grey-haired old men and women sitting in the shade. I didn't recognize any of them, not even the one person I thought I would recognize, but I introduced myself, looked at some of the collages about the past 45 years, and watched as the number of attendees swelled to perhaps 50 or so -- none of whom I recognized.

I did find my former neighbor, a rotund, rosy-faced, grey-haired little old lady who was wearing a straw bonnet covered in flowers and ribbons. It was such a cliche and so totally over the top, but it's her life. We talked a bit about the old neighborhood, and I tried to confirm that her brother married one of the girls who lived in the house between hers and mine, but after thinking about it for at least a full minute, if not longer, her only reply was, "Well, if her name was Jan, I think my brother married her." Perhaps not all the fruit is in her basket?

I talked to a nice guy, one of the twins in our class, about his career as an architect, his married children, and his grandchildren, the youngest of whom is 2 weeks old and lives in Prague with his family, the father of which teaches in the International school there. I talked to a blow-hard who claims to be a well-decorated author of numerous computer games, the names of which I recognized because my son is a gamer. He insisted that I sign his 45-year-old yearbook because back then, no one signed books (which could be true, I guess, but I think it's just that no one signed his because he seemed like a recognizable leopard wearing the same spots, if you catch my drift). I talked to the reunion organizer, who again invited me to visit her in her mountain retreat in some southern state in the middle of the US map. And I talked to a former Francis, who is now "Just Fran," and continues employment as a nurse because she can't decide if the patients need her or she needs them.

No, no one really asked me about me, but they did ask me about a lot of other classmates, some of whom are dead and all of whom weren't at this reunion function, so I didn't have much to add to those conversations.

After about an hour of this, I'd decided it was time to depart when a bouncy woman giggled her way in my direction, looked me up and down, and asked, "Who were you?"

"Uh, last time I looked, I still am, so I'm not sure what you're asking me," I replied, but supplied my "high school" name.

"Oh," she replied, obviously cluelesss. "Did I know you?"

"Nope," I said, and headed for my car.