I Went to My High School Reunion and Lived to Tell

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A few weeks ago I wrote about attending my high school reunion and the things I wasn’t going to do before attending the said reunion.

I got a surprisingly positive response from that post and lots of requests for a follow-up post,

Mostly because you really wanted to know if I told everyone that I trained hamsters in my basement.

Sorry to disappoint you.

I did, however, tell someone I invented post-its, to which they responded ROMY AND MICHELE!! then I open mouth kissed them no I didn’t,

So change of plans week of the reunion, I decided to bring my mommy with me on the reunion trip!

My mom hadn’t been back “home” in some time and we decided to right that wrong and make it a girls trip.

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We talked the entire seven-hour trip to Ohio and the entire seven-hour trip back, with the only silence coming when I took a quick nap on the way home because I am apparently too old to attend high school reunions.

We drove around old neighborhoods, visited my mom’s childhood farm, and she told me stories I’d heard and some I hadn’t; I got to see the funeral home (now just a home) where my grandfather’s funeral was held (something I’d never seen even when I lived there); and, most importantly, we visited my grandparents.

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I used to go to this cemetery with my mother and grandmother when I was a child. My grandfather died while my mother was in college, so I never met him, but I feel like I know him from the stories my mother and grandmother have told me over the years, as well as the cemetery visits.

Taking water from a nearby spigot and planting flowers by his (now their) grave; visiting every Memorial Day to honor him with a flag; walking around the cemetery and seeing familiar names; names that now grace street signs in the neighboring town.

We know our loved ones aren’t “there,” but it’s still nice to have a place to talk to them. A physical memorial on Earth, close to where they lived, worked, and died. For some strange reason, I feel at home every time I visit. Just seeing my grandparents’ names etched in marble, sitting in the same spot where I was a child makes me feel safe.

They existed, they were significant, and they had meaning.

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This cemetery contains the graves of several family members, including aunts, uncles, great-grandparents, and so on.

So, like the worst family reunion ever, we visit everyone while we’re there, going from grave to grave.

We came across this metal heart while visiting my Aunt Minnie’s grave .

“Umm, I have that exact heart in my garden,” I said to my mom.

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I’ve had it for so long that I’ve forgotten where I got it. If you know me, you know how much I enjoy things like this; I almost squealed. Some may believe it is a coincidence, but I will always believe it is not.

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I promise we didn’t spend the entire weekend in the cemetery. We had a girls’ night out complete with margaritas with some of our family, then we went to an old haunt and had ice cream with friends.

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There’s just something so comforting about sitting in a restaurant that was there when I was a teenager. This small ice cream shop was my brother’s first job, and it’s right across the street from the nursing home where my mother worked the last year we lived in Ohio.

Funny story, I was told by a former classmate who worked at the same nursing home, my mother tried to save her coworker’s job in 1988 because he wanted to miss work on Senior Ditch Day, which was approaching and for which he was scheduled. He lost his job as a result of her unsuccessful battle on his behalf, but he never forgot her kindness.

He’s a minister now. 

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I forgot to unplug the cooler that was charging in the back before going to bed because I was still tired from the previous night’s fun and was also exhausted from the seven-hour drive and three hours of sleep.

Thank God my cousin’s husband was nearby to assist with jump starting my car.

Before going to my friend’s house to set up for the reunion, he instructed me to drive around for a while to let the battery charge up.

IF I HAVE TO.

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If hell had a hallway, that would be it.

To cut a long story short, I had a third-grade teacher who should have been fired. She was physically and mentally abusive to her students, and I couldn’t go near the school for years because of the horrible memories.

I missed so much school during third grade that I almost had to repeat a grade because I was so frightened of her.

I vomited every morning, and if I didn’t, I would vomit at school and end up in the nurses’ office.

I have trauma to this day because of that evil human.

I found out later that the school district couldn’t get rid of her. Because of tenure.

So, as part of our reunion, we visited the schools we went to, which included three elementary schools, a junior high, and the high school, where the reunion would be held at the end of the day.

I was ecstatic at the prospect of seeing old schools because I hadn’t been in most of them in over 35 years.

Except for Central Elementary School.

I was only there for one year, third grade.

I discovered her obituary from 2012, which stated that her husband was a minister and that she was a “faithful” and “involved” church member.

That is all I will say.

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We all joked while taking the tour that maybe we went to school in prison because of how old and decrepit our schools were.

NOW, I know this is some 35 years plus later, but they were this shitty 35 plus years ago.

When I got home from the reunion, I had my first full-fledged panic attack (apparently the ones before were anxiety attacks). I awoke from a dead sleep with the sensation that someone was suffocating me. It was horrible, I was gasping for air and crying.

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My old junior high (we didn’t call it middle school like they do here) was a much better experience because I was a good 5000 feet from Central Elementary.

See? PRISON.  I mean, just look:

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By the way, those prison bathrooms had very short doors. Creepy AF considering that when you are in junior-middle school, you are GROWING TALLER.

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Except for me.

I look like I am in fifth grade here.

I am actually in seventh. 

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Next stop on our tour, the classroom where I got my first period!

I remember I was wearing white pants and an Esprit sweatshirt when I “became a woman” in the prison bathroom.

That sounds dirtier than what I wanted it to.

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Every breath you take, every move you make, every bond you break, every step you take, Central Elementary will be watching you. 

That up there was my art room in 7th grade.

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Fun fact- The Shawshank Redemption was filmed about 15 miles from my school and in and around the county I grew up in.

So when we were touring the schools, we wondered if some of the scenes were filmed IN our junior high.

Case in point:

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So let’s get to the good stuff, shall we? I was walking with a lovely group of former classmates around the junior high when we come around the corner and see some other classmates surrounding the woman above.

My former classmate says to me, “Kari, look who’s here!”

Of course, I didn’t know who it was immediately, then a mention that it is our sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Nye.

She was the polar opposite of my third-grade teacher, from whom I had to recover for years because I had anxiety, which we didn’t know was a thing back then.

I was fortunate to have wonderful teachers in fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, but the damage done by Satan’s minion was permanent, and I struggled to trust teachers (and adults, for that matter) for a long time.

By 6th grade, I was getting better and Mrs. Nye was perfect for me.

She was kind, quiet, and a tad introverted but not too much as to be able to stand in front of a classroom of snarky sixth graders and teach five days a week.

I remember being asked to choose a topic for a presentation to my sixth-grade class, and I chose computers. Why? I have no answer for you. Remember, this was 1982, and computers were like robots to us at the time. Everyone was intrigued by them, but no one knew anything about them. However, all of the good topics were probably chosen because my lack of motivation in 1982 me is likely to be very similar to my lack of motivation in 2018 me.

I remember the entire class was glazed over as I gave a presentation about something no one had a remote interest in. Including myself.

The rest was hazy but I do remember after receiving my D grade on a paper I didn’t do much research on, I pretty much plagiarized, and that I probably wrote the night before, Mrs. Nye gently told me to stick to what I know not what I think I should know.

I didn’t realize it until the ride home but seeing Mrs. Nye was just what I needed on this emotionally charged stroll down memory lane.

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I’m never ready for a picture, even when I should be, but I loved this and seeing Mrs. Nye again was probably the best part of the reunion for me. Teachers simply do not realize how much power they have over both positive and negative childhood memories. And, having completed the ninth circle of hell at Central, I choose to remember the good. Mrs. Nye was a nice person, and as I wrote in her yearbook on the day of the reunion, “I am who I am today because of you.”

She doesn’t read my blog, so she will take that as a compliment. 

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I hadn’t been back to my high school since June of 1988. It’s funny how I could not WAIT to get the hell out of that place and now I couldn’t WAIT to get back in.

Partly because this building may not be here in five years, mostly because of the people who were going to fill it that evening.

It’s funny how memories can do that to you; how smells of the wax they use on the floors can bring you back to freshman year gym class or how the smell of the biology lab can bring you back to 10th-grade frog dissection.

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Entering my high school cafeteria to set up for the reunion, I immediately remembered eating tuna salad sandwiches, Fritos, and orange drink every single day during my senior year.

What do they call that?

Being in a place brings back more memories than talking about it.

The lack of bragging was the one difference I noticed between the 30-year reunion and the 10-year reunion.

This time around, I felt like most people were just so happy to see each other.

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It’s funny, a lot of people didn’t recognize me at first.

I hadn’t been to a reunion since our ten-year in 1998, so it didn’t really surprise me but over the course of several hours I started to realize why.

I wasn’t me in high school.

At the reunion I was confident, making jokes, and really happy.

I am quite positive that in my years at the high school, that part of me came out a lot less in four years than it did in four hours that evening.

I wasn’t brooding and sullen in high school, but I wasn’t me either.

I didn’t have the confidence that years of really living life can give to you.

I was boxed in by what others thought of me, by my anxiety, and the choices that anxiety brought with it.

I also didn’t have glasses, which when I took them off at the end of the night, I got so many OH GOD NOW I REMEMBER YOU.

So maybe I am not as evolved as I’d like to think I am. 

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I also didn’t have this chick.

God, I love her.

She essentially planned the entire reunion by herself, with some minimal help from myself and really, a couple others.

We were only acquaintances in high school, but this entire day made me wonder what I would have been like if we had been friends back then.

Maybe the same, maybe different. It makes you realize that sometimes, as a parent, you can try really hard to shape your kids but at the end of the day, it’s who they surround themselves with that makes them who they are.

Maybe not.

All I know is that I’m glad I went to the reunion, and maybe I’ll go again in five years.

If I want to brag about it, I need to get those hamsters really well trained.