My Class Reunion (posted 9/10/25, before the news of Charlie Kirk’s death broke)

I’m back home in Florida after my trip north.  As always, it was nice to get away for a while, and also nice to get back home.  The highlight of the trip was my first high school class reunion in 45 years, which took place on Friday evening, in Bloomington, Illinois. 

I got into town on Thursday evening, and had a late supper with a cousin who was working at a nearby power plant during September.  Afterwards, I watched the second half of the first NFL game of the season in my hotel room, before falling asleep.

The weather was a nice break from early September at home – cool and sunny – and I had a rare chance to spend an entire day on Friday, running around two familiar towns from my past – on my own, and with no particular agenda.   First I drove the 18 miles to El Paso, the town of around 2500 where I spent a decade from age 10 to 20.

Cruising into town, I found myself thinking about a moment in A Christmas Carol, though Dickens’ setting in a 19th century winter in England couldn’t be more different than a Midwestern farm town in late summer of 2025.  When the Ghost of Christmas Past transports Scrooge to his long-gone hometown, he looks around himself and says, “I was bred in this place.  I was a boy here!”

For the next couple of hours, I experienced the strange kind of disorientation that revisiting places from long past always produces.  Everything was familiar…but different, too.  Some buildings were smaller; some run-down, some remodeled.  The high school was the same, but the football field behind it was shrunken, somehow.  (I know.  It is still 100 yards, plus the end zones.  But it felt like a stadium when I played on that field.)

Our old house is the same, though painted a different color.  There are two new blocks of houses on the north side of town, in what had been cornfields in 1980.  I drove past several houses of old buddies, and they seemed closer than I remember, probably because the geography in my long-term memory was hard-wired for measuring distances on foot or by bicycle.

I recognized every detail of two houses of old girlfriends, both of which I could still walk or bike to with my eyes closed.  (“Remember it?” Scrooge says.  “I could walk it blindfold!”) Parked outside of both houses, I knew which windows had been each of theirs – both on second floors, a smart move for the dads of pretty, teenaged girls – and felt the jumbled, sensory echoes of old crushes, the indescribable longing no less strong for having been so ephemeral.

I remembered old cars I’d had – a rickety little Chevy Monza that I’d learned to drive a stick in, and a very cool ’72 Ford Gran Torino with a hood scoop and a blue racing stripe.  I remembered the clothes I’d worn – always Levis, usually flannel shirts, and later on, a letterman’s jacket – and the haircuts I’d had – all terrible! 

Driving toward the three-block downtown, I remembered music I’d listened to – with specific friends, or specific girls, or on specific trips:  Thin Lizzy and Foghat and the Beatles and Cheap Trick, and a dozen others. 

Most of the local class reunions are scheduled for early September, when the social event of the Midwestern year was going on: the Corn Festival.  New Orleans can have its Mardi Gras, Germany its Oktoberfest, and European capitals their Christkindlesmarkt, but for a teenage me in the late 1970s, the Corn Festival had everything!

Crooked ring-toss games, crooked shooting gallery games, a game where you could toss a ping pong ball into a tiny goldfish bowl and win a goldfish that would inevitably be dead in a week.  Rickety rides put together by alcoholic carnies with missing fingers and prison tats.  And all the best foods: sweet corn and fried chicken and cotton candy and ice cream cones (waffle or cake) and chocolate shakes.    

The guys who’d survived two-a-days and made the football team could wear their jerseys for the first time at the Corn Festival, and the cheerleaders wore their uniforms.  I reached a social status peak – driving the Torino, wearing my El Paso Comets jersey and walking through the Corn Festival with a cheerleader on my arm – that I never equaled until decades later, when I was tapped by the great and powerful CO as the Roving Correspondent.  (And before you can ask, yes: an orb, a scepter and a ceremonial sword were involved in that rite.)

Anyway, on Friday morning, the three blocks of Front Street were blocked off, and the Corn Festival rides were all in place.  The festival itself didn’t start until around suppertime, so I went to visit my favorite old haunt that didn’t involve either girls or sports: the Carnegie Library in Jefferson Park. 

Because I was raised in what was essentially the 19^th century – before cell phones or the internet, when we had three tv channels, and they actually went off the air each night, after playing the national anthem – we could still have a park named after Jefferson and a library given to us by Carnegie without a mob of multiply-pierced freaks denouncing them as racists and robber barons, respectively.

The library was small but impressive, built of white stone, with round turrets flanking the front door.  To a 10-year-old me, it seemed like a classic European castle, and I spent many hours in there, preparing for my quixotic career as an English professor.  At some point in the intervening decades, a modern wing was built onto the old library, so I went straight through the new part to get to the old one, and found that I remembered the layout well.

I was surprised to find my old yearbook laid out on a heavy reading table!  Then I noticed that there were half a dozen other yearbooks, each from a year ending in “0” or “5,” because other classes were having their reunions in town this weekend, too.  So I looked through that yearbook, and felt another wave of renewed nostalgia. 

After lunch at a favorite pizza place in town, I drove back to Bloomington, home of Illinois State U, where I got my MA in the middle 80s, before God guided me to Florida, to meet my wife and produce my children, and become a Fightin’ Gator.  

I spent my afternoon visiting some familiar sites around town, and then walking through campus, which is greatly changed.   There are a lot of new dorms and academic buildings, and a lot of big hotels, but a several-block area of two-story brick buildings still remains, anchored around an old movie theatre that now appears to show mostly art movies and old movies. 

The reunion that evening was at a classmate’s house on one of the prettiest streets in an older part of town.  Around 20 people showed up, which wasn’t bad, considering that our graduating class had only had about 68 people in it.  Most had been to earlier reunions, so I’d missed out on seeing them then. 

Two of my best friends are in Texas now and couldn’t make it, but I got to see a bunch of other friends, and was pleasantly surprised that for the most part, the years seemed to drop away, and the conversations were easy.  I talked to a few classmates whom I hadn’t been particularly close to, but we found each other funny and easy to talk to.  I enjoyed the time I spent with them as much as I did the time I spent re-connecting to others I’d known better.

We spent almost four hours there, and the time went quickly. I found out a lot about everybody’s marriages, kids and grandkids, along with careers, successes and losses.  No one was obnoxious or overbearing, and a few who had been a little intense or manic in high school had mellowed, as one would hope.  The whole evening had a nice, Midwestern vibe, with no one putting on airs or getting into their cups and causing a scene.

A lot of pictures were taken, and when someone suggested that we take one of all of the bald guys, there was a lot of laughter, and no offense taken.  In fact, one of my female classmates happily joined in that picture; she’s a lovely person, who recently found out she had cancer, and the chemo’s effects earned her a place in the bald photo. 

In keeping with our stage of life, some discussion naturally turned to mortality and health issues.  One of my buddies had his arm in a sling after a recent shoulder surgery, and several had had cancer scares.  One of my best friends, now in Texas, had planned to come, but recently had part of a lung removed due to cancer, even though he’s never smoked. 

A few weeks ago, one of the reunion planners put together a list of classmates who have died, and I was surprised to see that it was 14 out of our original 68.  That seems like a lot, considering we are in our early 60s!  The individual stories run the gamut from the tragically predictable to the “there but for the grace of God go I” variety.

Two classmates went in car wrecks before we graduated high school, and a few from cancer between age 40 and 60.  Drug and alcohol problems have accounted for more, including a good female friend of mine who died of cirrhosis at 50.  One of the wilder guys in our class died in a shoot-out with police, and there was talk that it might have been “suicide by cop.”  Heart attacks have taken a few, and a handful have moved away; a few of those have shown up in obituaries, but with no mention of the cause of death. 

I talked to one classmate who wistfully described his marriage breaking up after his wife had lost a set of premature twins, and then “gone off the deep end” and eventually left him.  I talked to another who had been on the wild side in high school, but who now seems to radiate a kind of zen peacefulness.  It turns out he had a terrible heart attack two years ago, which has brought him to a deep faith that he was a little sheepish to tell me about.

He had just arrived at a work function when he went down, and everything lined up perfectly for him.  Two of the people there had CPR experience, and paramedics and a good hospital were nearby; his heart stopped three times, but they were able to resuscitate him each time, and his surgery went very well.  He’s savoring every day and feels like he’s playing with house money, and I loved hearing him tell that story.   (I’m trying to look at life the same way, and am happy to do so without an intervening heart attack to forcibly focus my mind!)

Most of the group have kids, and a lot have grandkids.  Most of them seem to have enjoyed their careers, and a little more than half have retired.  A few love their work, and have no plans to retire.  Experiences with family have been all over the map.  Almost half of the ones I talked with have divorced, but most of them seem content with their second spouses, or no spouse.  Kids have been a great source of joy for some, and the cause of a lot of pain for others.     

Overall, I really enjoyed reconnecting after so many years.  Everyone there talked about looking forward to getting together again in 5 years for our 50^th, even though I think a lot of us probably shared one thought about that: how many of us might not be around for the next one?  Someone joked that we’re now in the sweet spot: retired (so we have more flexibility to come to a reunion) but not yet dead!

On one final personal note, we just found out that our youngest daughter is going to be heading off to England for at least the next year.  She had applied to several PhD programs this year, but with all of the university budget cut-backs recently, neither she nor any of her friends from Boulder’s competitive summer research program had gotten a slot.

But a former professor of hers pointed her to Exeter’s Master’s program, and she applied to study Physics with a focus on Astronomy.  She was accepted yesterday, so she’ll be leaving in a week.  My wife will fly over with her to get her squared away, and then we’ll both be looking for an excuse to go to England once or twice this year to visit her. 

Since I got back home I’ve caught up on some national news, and noticed that the Dems have continued to firmly grab onto the “10” side of several 90-10 issues.  So I’ll be back with another column on Friday to celebrate the salutary and mock the mock-worthy.         

Hamas delenda est!