Last weekend I went to my 40th high school reunion. When I first got the invitation months ago, I vowed I'd loose 40 pounds or I wouldn't go. I'd completely forgotten about it when I got an email from my cousin Christine asking if I was going. Christine and I are three weeks apart in age, and grew up across the street from each other. We were inseparable right up to high school graduation. We fought all the time, including sometimes even physical fights. We once decided to play heavyweight boxing champions, and ended up in a fight over who would be Joe Lewis and who would be Rocky Marciano, but no matter what, we'd be back out on the street together the next day looking for adventure. We took dancing lessons together and we used to play her mother's Vaughn Monroe album and make up dances to Ghost Riders in the Sky. Christine was taller than me and had blond curly hair and I envied those inches and that hair. I was a scrawny kid with scrawny straight dull brown hair. I had had a tape worm when I was 3 or 4. I don't recall it at all, but in the few photos of me at that time, I'm a skinny little thing. My mother tells me that for a long time I looked like a starving Ethiopian. Actually I don't think we knew the Ethiopian were starving then. We were still being told to eat everything on our plates because children were starving in China. She said she loved it when I had the mumps because I had full cheeks for once. No one could figure out what was wrong with me and I was indeed malnourished. The worm's discovery is a nasty story I will tell only to those in the mood for a yuuck contest . After the worm's demise, I was on a special diet. All I can recall of the whole thing is that for a long time I couldn't eat pork or ice cream. Finally I was recovered, eating ice cream, and being praised by all for every pound I put on. I was no longer looking skinny, just normal up to about the 4th grade. In fourth grade I started to feel fat. I have no sense of the objective truth about it now. I still have a small hand rolled piece of paper with a pink ribbon made by Miss Howard, which is my diploma for completing the 4th grade, with the declaration that I was voted Prettiest Girl, and Best Square Dancer with Stevie DeSimone. So was I the pretty little girl or the fat one I thought I was. If Christine had been in my class would I have won? There she remains in my memory with those long legs and that hair.
Good grief I've been feeling fat since the 4th grade. How exhausting. I look back at pictures of myself now, or at actual clothing I wore and see I was not fat at all. I have now finally feed myself into a state where I physically look like what I think I've always looked like.
To get back to Christine. She went off to college at U Mass in Amherst, and I stayed home. That is, I lived at home while I went to college. She met a man, well he was boy then, graduated, got married, had children and grand children. I dropped out of school, moved away to Washington DC, and never married. We saw each other only at family occasions which at first were weddings, and are now wakes.
I have grown up to be the same height as her and that glorious blond hair is now a matronly gray.
Somewhere in all this, I started to feel superior. I suppose that was my defense mechanism. I no longer had to envy her. True, she was married, but he was red faced and heavy, and worked in a fish processing plant, while I was spending a year in Europe or traveling through the Far East. I could convince myself that I was more interesting, more chic, more worldly, and she was stuck at home with three homely kids.
We sat together at the reunion, and many people told us that we now look like each other. How funny. But the important thing is that I enjoyed being with her and her husband John and I realized they were open and comfortable with them selves and their life. They were just being themselves, were comfortable, fun to be with, and didn't seem to be measuring themselves against other people there. I of course should have come with a yard stick and a clip board. Before I cut myself down completely, I will say I was proud of myself for going at all. I obviously hadn't lost the 40 pounds, but I decided to go and expose myself. A sort of physical bache. I also took comfort knowing there would be bald guys and other fat ladies. Still, it was going to be important to me that I looked younger, or better dressed, or more sophisticated that at least some of them.
One of the miserable parts of being single, is having to arrive somewhere alone, and then being the odd number. I had been at a fancy black tie dinner the night before, and there was that one glaring extra space at out table for 8. At the reunion, they squeezed in an extra place setting for me and I was grateful for not having to sit next to that ever empty seat. I wanted to back out of going all day. I was very nervous about it. But I did it. I went. I walked in alone, and once I got the first hug from someone I'd gone to the first grade with, I relaxed and had a great time. The fact is I was very popular in school, something I tend to forget.
The next reunion is in 5 years. It would be nice to have a date for it, but I know I can go alone again if I need to. They gave out a list of names of people who have died, so I'll be happy to just be there instead of on the "Gone but not forgotten " list, alone or not.