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Our
gathering was a couple of years ago. I won’t tell you how many
decades, but let’s just say the bride and groom of the shotgun wedding
we had the summer before our twelfth grade year now have a grandchild in
her first year of high school.
The
committee of women realized early on that to get enough people there,
more than one graduating class would have to be invited. A class above
ours and the two younger classes were chosen. With only a few dozen in
each of the four graduating classes, maybe they could persuade fifty
couples to show up.
The
event planning got off to a rocky start when the self-appointed
chairperson of the reunion committee got in a catfight with a couple
other members. They excluded her from any future meetings and vowed not
to acknowledge her existence the night of the gathering. It was like
elementary school playground antics all over again.
They
managed to pull it off and a few more than the expected fifty couples
converged on the country club ballroom for a night of reminiscing (or
rehashing a lot of stuff some of us had spent a good bit of time trying
to forget). I only have room to describe a fraction of what went on that
night.
The
first thing I noticed were the folks who were missing. Burt wasn’t
there. He’s in the Air Force working for NASA out in California. He’s
apparently pretty high up because another classmate of ours got him to
put a 35mm film canister of gourd seeds on one of the space shuttle
flights back in the ‘80s. The gourds produced from the seed were
nothing out of the ordinary.
Marsha
couldn’t get away from her home in the Florida Keys where she teaches
parasailing and makes pottery. She sells her work at a local art house.
Craig’s a real estate broker out in Houston and couldn’t get away
because of a couple of deals he had pending. Current addresses couldn’t
be found for several other people.
Tragedies
were also responsible for some absences. Patty fell asleep and hit a
bridge railing her second year of college. Dee Dee, who I thought was
the prettiest girl in our class and one of the nicest, rear-ended a
cotton trailer. She had been married only a few months. Joey was on one
of his fishpond levees after a storm and a power line got hung under his
truck. They found his body on the bank of the pond a few hours later.
Larry had become a partner in a successful law practice before he lost
his long battle with leukemia. Chase had moved to Boston and died from
complications of HIV. The only person in our class that we strongly
suspected of being mistreated at home as a child had turned to substance
abuse. About a year before she took her own life, Credence had confided
in another of our classmates that the pills kept her from feeling so
cold and alone.
Enough
gloom, back to the party!
First
of all, the band they’d hired knew seven songs. I counted them. After
we’d been there a couple or three hours, Ed Duncan, who had decided to
get every cents worth of his $50 registration fee back from the open
bar, started hitting on Pamela Quarles.
Ed
had been the quarterback on our pitiful little football team and had
been voted ‘Most Handsome’ in the yearbook. He was still the big man
on campus in his own mind. In reality, he had just gotten shed of his
third wife after a dispute in which she not only threw his stuff in the
frontyard but doused everything in gasoline and set it on fire. He had a
beer belly that made him look like he was a month past due and some of
his front teeth had fallen out along with most of his hair. He’s
managed to hang on to his position as the meat man at the Pig since
graduation.
Anyway,
Pam slapped the stew out of him and before he could get the taste back
in his mouth, her husband, Ernie, lit into him like a bannie hen on a
house cat. We dragged Ed’s unconscious body outside and put him on the
hood of his pickup. He was still sprawled there when we drove home.
Most
of the cheerleaders from our school were very nice people and the
embodiment of school spirit and youthful vitality. But there was this
one girl, a grade younger, a little, petite cutie who wouldn’t give a
clod like me a second glance. She was the daughter of a big plantation
farmer and thought she was better than the rest of us. The other girls
on the squad couldn’t understand why she was that way and were really
embarrassed by the way she acted. Anyway, after school, she married her
daddy’s farm manager who took over the farm after her father’s
death.
Turns
out, hubby was more interested in going to the gambling boat than he was
running a business. He lost just about everything his father-in-law had
built, and then ran off with some blackjack dealer. When she walked into
the room, fashionably late (or maybe because she had second thoughts
about coming), we were flabbergasted. A 55-gallon drum with a mustache
is the only way to describe her. She’d apparently given up on plucking
her eyebrows and had taken to brushing them out. We could only guess
that she bought her dress at an awning company. This was a sad case of
poetic justice if I’d ever seen it. But, you know what, we were nice
to her. Some of us even danced with her.
Like
the write up in the local paper’s society column stated in the next
week’s issue: "A good time was had by all."
Disclaimer: The story you just read is based on reality. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. Any likeness any character in this story has to you, your family or anybody you know or have known is completely coincidental.
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