Traveling Back

         Plane ticket : check

          Contact with BFFs : check

          Haircut :  check.

          L’Oreal-away those persistent gray hairs : check.

          Home mani/pedi : check.

          Obsessively try on possible outfits: check.

          Last week a high school reunion (a MAJOR one) was looming, and while I hadn’t seen my classmates since our 20^th was held and I was certain I’d never see most of them again, I was still a bit edgy about the whole thing.

          Fortunately, I had work at our still-unsold house to keep my busy. I had vacuumed the rugs, cleaned the glass in the front door, and had just given the upstairs bathrooms a quick once-over.

          I came down the stairs, Comet and rubber gloves in hand, and somehow managed to miss the last three stairs and crash to the floor at the bottom. I lay for several minutes to inventory possible broken body parts while simultaneously picturing all the airport real estate I’d soon have to haul my suitcase through.

          Everything seemed to be moving the way it should, although one forearm was hinting at future colorful bruises and my ankle was definitely the worse for wear. (Some day I’ll write about the time my husband ran a chainsaw across his hand days before we were due to leave on a cruise.)

          Two days of ice and elevation and my ankle was still swollen but that plane ticket was unrefundable, so off I went.

          Some of our noteworthy alumni at Washington-Lee High School (Arlington, Virginia) were Forrest Tucker, Shirley MacLaine and her brother Warren Beatty – all well before my time – and Sandra Bullock – long after me.

          My year had a few minor celebrities – a couple of names you hear regularly on NPR, and a pitcher for the major leagues, but none were there that evening. With a graduating class well over 700, it wasn’t surprising that many there were unfamiliar to me.  I soon learned, though, that wasn’t necessarily because we hadn’t shared space in Algebra.

          With that many years under our belts – or maybe more accurately, over them, it was tricky to first recall the name, and then connect it to the face. One or two people were remarkably unchanged, but for the majority of us it was as though ghosts of our former selves fleetingly played across our faces.