Candy in Hoosierland

To those of you who have checked in to see where the heck Candy is, thank you. It's comforting to someone who feels, regularly, as though she is swerving off the planet.

I'm in Indiana visiting my family for 9 days. This is a grand luxury, to be with my parents and sister (who lives 5 blocks away) for this long. It will be the highest number of consecutive days I've spent with my mom and dad since I was 19. Whether or not I have a curfew remains to be seen, since I haven't tested it. But tomorrow night is my high school reunion and I am sure to break the parental bedtime boundary of 10:30 p.m. I'll have to sneak in like a delinquent cheerleader, pom-poms tossed to the floor as I slither into bed.

Even if the reunion totally blows, which is a definite possibility, a classmate has informed me that we'll take our bad partying selves over to the Elks club, where a party is always afoot. Candy in an Elks club. Not a combo I'm eager to experience. But I must go with the flow. Candy always goes with the flow. Stop rolling your eyes. I mean it. Don't forget that I can ram my forehead through your screen and give you the stink eye.

My classmate Susan and I have also already discussed who will and probably won't attend the reunion. This is our 30th. Yes. We're old-ish. Our graduating class had 84 people in it and we're lucky if 20 show up for the reunions. It's frustrating because at least 75 people from our class live within a 5-mile radius, having never left town. But the reunion is apparently just not their cup of tea. Or they're too uppity to haul their high-brow selves over to visit with their old pals. Or maybe they think we're too boring. I find this a stretch, based on things like a conversation I had with a former classmate 1 year after graduation. I was at a social function my mom talked me into attending. I ran into a girl from my class.

Candy: Hey...what's new?

Classmate: Oh, just being married and all that.

Candy: Yeah? So how's that going?

Classmate: Well, I'm learning some new stuff.

Candy: Like what?

Classmate: Like there's this magazine article I saw about how to decorate the inside of your husband's lunchbox. With fabric.

Candy: Does your husband want his lunchbox decorated?

Classmate: Well, I made it so that when he opens it at lunchtime, this little curtain drops down over his sandwich. And then he lifts the curtain.

At that point I could not carry my end of the conversation because I was writhing on the ground with my hands on my throat trying to strangle myself. When that didn't work, I mashed my face into the grass and tried to burrow into an underground condominium of night crawlers, in search of a more interesting discussion. Say, about eating dirt.

So, no, boredom just doesn't qualify as an excuse to skip the reunion. Because if I lived through that conversation suffering only a grass-stained face, my classmates and I can all survive one another.

At our 15 year reunion, held at the American Legion, again we had the usual 25 or so, while less than a block away, several people from our class sat in one of the 2 bars in our hometown. This information was passed around at the reunion, and a few of us walked to the bar afterward to visit those who were holding court. It was a sad gathering. 3 or 4 guys from our class were at the bar, wearing hats, hiding their bald heads (so I was told...since I never saw the domes myself) and looking up sheepishly at us when we came in. It was obvious they wanted to be coaxed into the fold. A girl from our class who had recently divorced stood at the bar. I asked her why she hadn't come to the reunion.

"Are you f*cking kidding me? I'm not going to that motherf*cking thing."

Her anger was radiating from her in big red streaks like a cartoon thumb hit with a hammer. Life was not going well.

It wasn't going well for me either. I was there with my sullen, arrogant, posing, more-fun-than-a-nostril-full-of-raw-liver husband, and just wanted to see what was happening in the lives across the fence.

At this point, when we're pushing fifty, going to the reunion feels even more necessary to me. These are the people I knew in adolescence, and now we've passed into that crucial mid-life place of heart attacks and firm political opinions and grieving our parents who are either already gone or elderly, of re-evaluating everything up to this point, and of secretly being afraid we won't be good stewards of the time we have left. Or maybe my classmates don't dip into such self-indulgent, maudlin thoughts. Maybe I'm the only one who fears that I'll never "find" who really resides inside me, at least not to my satisfaction, never figure out what I'm supposed to be doing. But I doubt it.

My husband won't be here to meet the old group. He used up his vacation weeks on that pesky little wedding and Candy Relocation. But already I'm relishing how much better it feels to be missing the presence of someone great vs. attending the reunion with a man who makes me feel I'm wearing a dress made of lead.

I'd love to hear about your high school reunions. Did you go? Were they good or bad? What surprised you? Will you ever go again?