A 35th High School Reunion, a Final Concert, and a Graduation

It’s been quite a week for family milestone events.

The Reunion
By coincidence, my wife’s 35th high school reunion was the same evening as the day we crammed our new-college-graduate daughter’s gear in our little hatchback and delivered her to New York for the summer. Since we were in town anyway, we decided to splurge and head on over.

Although we didn’t know each other then, Dina and I actually attended the same high school, but I was two years ahead (in my yearbook, there’s actually a picture of the two of us next to each other at the back of a crowd of people–which we discovered the first time she came over to my house, back in 1978) and I knew quite a few people in her year.

The evening started inauspiciously when we realized the pants I’d picked out hadn’t made it into our duffel (and later, we discovered that some of Dina’s stuff had also eloped). But luckily, I’d just been in New York for a conference, and since that time I’d come in by bus, I left a bunch of freshly washed clothes at Dina’s parents’ house so we could pick them up now. Thus, I was reprieved from wearing the ragged shorts I’d used to help Alana move in, after all.

The last reunion of hers we attended, 15 years ago, had been a daytime event in a spacious restaurant, very family-oriented (we brought our kids, who were only 2 and 7 at the time). This event was in the function room of an Irish sports bar. The first thing that hit us was the noise. Most people were lined up near the bar, or in the corridor alongside it, trying to talk to their old friends over the roar of everyone else doing the same. A few hundred people in a fairly narrow space. There was a more open area with some tables and chairs, and I found myself frequently steering people over there so I could hear what they were trying to tell me.

And the organizers had chosen an open bar, which meant that tickets were fairly pricy. I’d have much preferred a cash bar and a lower admission charge, and I think more of my friends (who tended at least back then to be quite frugal) might have attended.

Some other advice to the organizers: if you have a walk-in option, buy a packet of blank name tags. And if your event is in midtown Manhattan and you didn’t buy enough name tags, send someone out to buy more and don’t make lame excuses. Also, if you’re preprinting name tags, make the type big and dark enough so that 50-year-old eyes can see them easily in a dark restaurant. For reunions, it’s a nice touch to do what the organizers did at my 25th reunion: add the yearbook photos to the preregistrants’ badges.

While none of my close friends from Dina’s year were in attendance, there were actually a fair number of people I knew, and it was quite fun to see them. As a group, her year has aged gracefully, for the most part looking like graying and heavier versions of the young people we’d been. Quite a few could have passed for early 40s or even late 30s, and many were easy to identify even without readable name tags. Oddly enough, they looked about the same age as the attenders at my 25th, eight years ago.

The Week
It’s been even more hectic than the usual end-of-semester spring craziness. Here’s what my schedule’s been the past two weeks:
Sunday, May 23: take the bus to New York for Book Expo America
Thursday, May 27: catch a bus back home
Saturday, May 29: leave at 9 a.m. to drive to Boston (almost two hours in the wrong direction) for my son Rafael’s final rehearsal, then drive directly to Ohio for Alana’s graduation
Monday, May 31: Alana graduates, we load every square inch of the car and start driving home
Tuesday, June 1: We’re still on the road when my son is due to participate in a class presentation so he does his part from an Internet café; we arrive home a few hours later
Friday, June 4: Raf’s orchestra concert in Boston, from which we arrive home at 1 a.m.
Saturday, June 5: Drive Alana to New York and go to the reunion

Is it possible to feel jet-lagged when you haven’t been in a plane and haven’t crossed any timezones? Yes.

The Graduation
Somehow, it hadn’t occurred to Alana, or to any of her three apartment-mates that packing before we got there would be a good idea, even though we’d told her ahead that we wanted her to be as packed as possible. So when we arrived Sunday afternoon, we had to throw ourselves into helping her get ready, as did the parents of the other girls. Packing boxes and duffels, hauling mountains of trash to the dumpster and unwanted property to the swap area. Shlepping a huge box that was never going to fit in the car to a mailing service. And of course, cleaning the place so they didn’t get charged huge amounts of money for improperly vacating.

Amidst all this, we did manage to go to a reception for honors graduates at the gardens outside the school president’s house, which featured very fancy hors d’oeuvres and a lot of desserts built around massive quantities of cream–and then, figuring the local restaurants would be overcrowded, we drove 15 miles to an Indian restaurant, and then back in time for the graduation concert.

Despite predictions of rain, Monday was bright and sunny. We were staying on the other side of town, so we walked over, said hi to Alana at her staging area, and found seats in the shade. The poor graduates, however, were in the open sun with no protection. Alana got mildly sunburned, and one of her housemates got heat stroke.

Although I’m far from a “pompy” person and have been accused of being somewhat scornful of unnecessary ritual, I actually appreciated all the pomp and ritual, which I had never experienced at my own college graduation. My college was very informal and skipped the processional through all the professors in their robes and all the rest of it. I felt the solemnity was appropriate, although the event could have been easily shortened. I liked that the dean of the music conservatory called people by their first, middle, and last names; the other majors only got first and last. I liked seeing the honorary doctorate candidates receive their hoods. And I felt a bit cheated that my graduation had skipped most of these little rituals (they did call our full names, if I remember correctly after all those years). And of course, I was totally thrilled to watch Alana walk across he stage and receive her diploma. Less than a week later, she’s off on her own in New York, sharing an apartment with two friends, taking a program in teaching English abroad (her plan for the fall), followed by an internship for a literary agent. She’s taken full advantage of the opportunity to immerse herself in learning and in community during these four years, and I’m very proud of her.

The Concert
I’m proud of my son, too. Raf is an awesome musician and he plays in an awesome orchestra. The concert at New England Conservatory Friday night was ambitious and amazing. Young People’s Philharmonic plays better than many adult orchestras I’ve seen, and at the end of the concert, the conductor read a list of which graduating seniors were going to what colleges. Of the 38 graduates, most were going either to top conservatories like Julliard and Curtis or top academic schools like Harvard and Yale. And the repertoire they play is quite challenging: Mahler’s 10th, a difficult cello concerto by Shostakovitch (with an amazing soloist, James Kim), and Bartok’s final (and lovely) orchestral work, written as he faced his own mortality from a hospital bed.

So now I’m finally back home, no more traveling for the rest of the month, so hopefully some time to catch up on work. Except that we’re going to be inundated with visiting relatives, and then next month, we’re traveling again. It’s a crazy life, but actually, I love it.