Thursday, September 12, 2019 by WannaskaWriter

                                                  1969

I missed going to my 50th high school reunion--and the first 49 as well. I had intended to go in a far off maybe way, understanding that at least one of my old friends I hadn’t seen for 36 years would be there, but as in life the majority of the time, other things popped up at the last minute--or a week or two before-- and I set aside my maybe plans, and did not go after all.
 
It isn’t like the distance isn’t drivable; I’ve done it several dozen times in my life. I’ve got three vehicles--maybe a fourth on the way--to drive down there to Des Moines in relatively reliable condition.
 
And, so far, I am in relatively reliable condition to make the drive too. I’ve slowed down considerably from working at the toy factory days, when I’d have to drive fast as hell to get to work on time--and still didn’t always make it even though I set new land speed records from southwest of Wannaska during those many years. Now, I conservatively drive the speed limit--mostly.
 
I’ve been driving that almost 600 mile distance all my life, just as friend Joe has been driving the almost 1800 miles to Hull, as just a familiar journey--with changes every few years as routes are modified and curves are straightened and small towns cease to be.
I have images of places in my head, along that route, from places with no emotional or eventful memories other than being places I’ve passed through, whether it was a tree-less rise of a two-lane blacktop in Iowa, or a long stretch of MN Hwy 4 that descends into the Minnesota River valley.
 
And often, I’ve driven the distance alone for one reason or another. My passengers since then, mostly just wanted to finally get there and not languish on some gravel road/blacktop that didn’t appear to lead anywhere and obviously lengthened their misery in the confines of a car -- with me.
 
These were the days before cellphones, iPads, electronic games, and the opportunity of sleep became available for front seat passengers were expected to sometimes be navigators, item passers, scenery appreciators, history listeners and keen-eyed watchers for ditch deer poppers, farm animal fence jumpers pretending to be roadside browsers, waterfowl baby marches, turtles trying to cross the road and, if should be the possibility, various large animal blockages in the form of cattle, sheep, elk, moose and/or, an extremely rare bison; or in the case of human-made obstructions like house movers, farm equipment, trains, road closures, wash-outs, horse and buggies (Amish country) or sudden dead ends.
 
Regardless, I didn’t make the trip to my 50th high school reunion.
 
Well, if the wife went along, it would’ve been right down interstate I-35 at speeds of 75-80 mph (just to keep up with traffic flow) and I/we would’ve by-passed everything, town-wise, to get there in the shortest time possible, recalling the time we took a tour of Dows, Iowa, looking for a gasoline station when I discovered I was so low on gas, and were towed into Elkhart, after we ran out, where we were intending to go for a family reunion. One of the family who lived there gave us five gallons of gas and wouldn’t accept payment for it.
 
And once we’d arrive in Des Moines, I would’ve driven past the old haunts that no one cares about or aren’t there anymore, and doesn’t matter to anyone but me, and Jeff who just got out of prison a few months ago and had missed ten years of predictable changes too: The suburbs spread out; old neighborhood shopping areas were gentrified or demolished. Cultural populations changed, other groupings moved in.
 
I'd see the same things: Old upstairs apartment house windows, with lifeless curtains and dirty window box fans, that still look dreary below seemingly normal gray, cloudless skies--or maybe it is just my mood when I am there, dreading I’d ever be stuck forever, along the railroad tracks on Des Moines Eastside, in the shadow of what used to be called, “Inland Mills”.
 
At the reunion, I would’ve signed the register and put my name tag on while looking for anyone I would recognize from my dusty old high school memory file, that in my mind’s eye, contained but a few particular names and faces, only two of whom I’d probably recognize after all this time, and one of those because he was facially scarred in an incident involving my homemade cannon in the very early 1970s. The other guy may have just grown old as some people tend to do, gained a little weight, maybe had gone through a nasty divorce, became an international arms dealer, never know.
 
But haven’t we all had our appearances altered by loss of epidermal elasticity or hair loss? Well, not including those who have embraced botox and tummy-tucks and teeth straightening devices, boob transplants (another term for divorce trades) breast enlargements or reductions, facial reconstruction, hair transplants, amputations and/or significant weight loss.
 
No, no one saw my name on the register. Likely, no one missed it either, especially a couple old girlfriends and an ex-wife, any of whom would’ve enjoyed seeing me slowly walking with the aid of a cane or represented in a funeral urn had I turned up
 
The girlfriends would maybe just be curious about what I looked like after fifty years, “Yeah, I knew he’d end up like an wrinkled old grape, but going bald? I’d never guessed” one or more of them might’ve mused, but more than likely, any one of them would have said as they looked at the class graduation photo roster,
“Steve Who? That guy? Ugh, I never had the hots for anything that looked like him, did you Denise R., Paulette C.?” . 
 
The two things that would’ve made those couple days of high school reunion easier for me would’ve been, first of all, name tags for all those people and ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos below them.
 
Fiftieth high school reunion gatherings for a period of life, during the late 1960s in which so many high schoolers in the U.S., regret having to had endured at all, cannot be well-attended events nor ones that the participants soul-fully regretted not attending afterward, although I was inwardly (now outwardly) curious about a few people whose names surnames I won’t divulge, whose existence positively altered my life to some degree, if but as adolescent importance...
 
Take for instance, Susan P, a black woman who literally saved me an ass-whuppin’ at the hands of a few newly-coined Black Panthers sportin’ their colors and berets outside our Geometry or Algebra class one afternoon. (I hated either class/was lousy in it and probably only passed because Susan sat beside me, alphabetically speaking.) Susan, an interesting woman of some proportion, had grown up with Steven G. and berated him for his non-typical aggressive behavior toward me, something that embarrassed him in front of his cronies--and bought me enough time to leave the aisle unmolested because of the color of my skin.
 
There were a few guys too that stepped up to curb the violence, whose names, without the immediate availability of an old yearbook I can’t remember. Their actions helped me, and in turn, I steered others away from particular places where other people used their behaviors to incite violence. I encouraged them to become conscious of where they were in the building.
 
Racism can work both ways, something I had experienced during my years in junior and senior high school--realizing, during those six years, what I had seen as aggression, i.e., ‘violence,’ was normal to many of the perpetrators and their ancestor’s lives for many generations; that this generation/my generation were merely acting out their pain and frustration with the system during a time when the Civil Rights Movement gained center stage TV exposure on the American scene, but I was too ignorant to know that these people weren’t just angry with their present state of being, but the systemic culture of apartheid across the Nation as a whole.
 
It wasn't until some twenty-five some years later that I learned what had historically occurred, especially in the South, and how big a role ignorance played in how I viewed people and how they viewed me.