I think I can add something different. I'm not invited to my h.s. reunions since I quit on my 16th birthday. (I'll put my disastrous h.s. years up against anyone. Anyone who survived theirs. )Wouldn't mind going, I wonder about people, don't know any of them anymore, would be fun to refresh that mental idea I carry of them, like those wallet-sized school pictures we used to trade, meaningfully.

I did go to a 25th elementary school reunion last month, and people say this is unusual, but it was a lab school for the university, there was only one class per grade year, and we knew each other--most of our parents taught at the college. There were one-way-mirrored observation booths in the classrooms, mics in the ceiling, futuristic optimism in the air. When people ask me about religion, how I was raised, I have to say I was raised as a science experiment. I remembered everybody, but only a few from my class showed up.

We were asked to write something about our most memorable experience, and although I remembered nearly everything, I settled on singing the Ash Grove in music class. You know it has a line "the friends of my childhood again are before me, each face" etc.--in the version we'd sung. I remember singing that, and looking around the room at us all, little kids singing this wistful, nostalgic song, and having an idea it was sort of funny, and sad. I think even as a child I was affected by children's faces.

All our teachers looked exactly the same or a little younger than they had been, they were mostly retired, travelling, bright and happy. My 3rd grade teacher was still the most beautiful woman in the world--if only she had waited for me, not married some jerk when I was 8. We, on the other hand, we looked like we'd been beat, been touring with the stones, done something to upset both Joe Pesci and Jackie Chan, we must've been living wrong. Cool!--I guess I look okay, then.

My little sister still holds grudges, although she was cute (the women in my family are attractive, the men potato-faced) and was popular, but not into all that. "Do people think I don't remember what assholes they were?" She's a little beyond cute now, and is single. But I have only one--a pathetic p.e. teacher in seventh grade who buddied up to the in-kids, and joined in calling a couple of unpopular kids by nicknames. If I run into that guy in an afterlife there'll be a scene. SharonA, I happen to know someone who lost a daughter the same way, and is still looking. How awful.