What’s past is sometimes a present

By Ed Goldman

Two weeks ago I attended two reunions with Cynthia Larsen (whom I’ve coyly referred to as my OSSO—oh-so-significant-other—for entirely too long): (a) an annual two-day event with my high school theatre buddies; and (b) her three-day, 50-year high school reunion.

The two events were similar only in that they were mostly love fests and that neither of us knew the people at each other’s get-together. That gave each of us a chance to learn about the other through the comments, memories and affection of others in our early lives—and to meet people whom each of us spoke about from time to time with fondness and nostalgia.

Cynthia said that reuniting with classmates, some of whom she knew since the first grade, was an opportunity to reflect on how the test lab of our childhoods helped prep us for the adults we eventually became.

I didn’t have that chance since I’d known the people at my reunion only since high school and mostly in the socially hermetic bubble of being in drama classes and plays together. While we all cared about each other, we also competed for leading or supporting roles in plays (not sports or academic endeavors, fevvin’s sake). When we resumed seeing each other years later, I arrived late to the game, having moved 500 miles away at the age of 25 from Lakewood/Long Beach, the connected neighborhood and beachhead of our youth.

By the time we started our annual in-person reunions—and in recent years, also visiting by Zoom a couple of times a month—we were adults: people who’d experienced the inevitable tragedies of loss and disappointment for decades.

Both Cynthia’s and my reunions had bittersweet edges—sometimes events like these are the first time you learn about acquaintances who’ve died—but at the core were savory.

If the stars align, the most exciting thing that happens at a reunion is someone misplaces a cellphone and the emcee asks everyone in the place for a moment of absolute silence to allow an attendee to place a call to the missing object in question, thereby revealing its location.

This is what happened during the dinner at Cynthia’s reunion and I can report that the only other time I saw a room silence itself so readily and completely was when the Monsignor at Christian Brothers High School stood to speak at a homecoming dinner. Men in their 70s and 80s had been engaged in a noisy but tame food fight. (I am not kidding; this was about 30+ years ago and I was the hapless guest speaker.)