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If you live in Colorado, you read many stories about Greeley in the summer. But I did not venture northward last weekend to observe the Broncos in training. Mindful of the majority of advice I received from diverse readers last winter, I attended the 20-year reunion of the classes of 1968 at Greeley West and Greeley Central high schools.
It's not easy to write about. Vast hordes of baby
boomers have tried to recall old times with books and
articles, and movies like The Big Chill
and Peggy
Sue Got Married
have been quite popular. What else can
be said?
Do you try the What Really Happened to the Class of
'68
approach -- write about real people as though they
were cliche characters? Then Ed the Rebel could report that
he ran into Rick the Biker and Vera the Valedictorian.
Somewhat to his surprise and much to his pleasure, he was
still on speaking terms with both.
Or you could try some sociology. We took Zero Population Growth quite seriously. All you needed were four offspring to win the prize for the most children. Most children at the picnic were astonishingly young -- scores of preschoolers. What you read about women turning 30 and deciding that they should start families before their biological clocks run out -- it must be true.
Or I could look at it as a nostalgic trip back to the home town. Which one, though? Evans the grade-school town? Greeley the high-school town? Or Greeley the college town? They may be the same on a map, but they're different places. None of them is the same place today anyway; I had an awful time finding my way around. Thanks to shaded malls, parking zones and one-way streets, you'd need a D-9 Caterpillar to cruise around Dizzy Block.
Memories? Ed, I'll never forget the time the hood
flow off that old Ford of yours.
Remember the time
we got hauled into the office for ditching that
assembly?
Well, yes, now that you bring it up. But I've
been working real hard to forget things like that.
Maybe those truly were Happy Days,
but I was
often fretful during high school, and I spent a lot of the
reunion feeling the same way. Once I had been one of the
Evans kids,
a hick terrified at the prospects when
consolidation sent us into the big schools of Greeley.
Twenty years later, I kept chewing on my beard and thinking
Some people were built to hide out in laid-back little
mountain towns, and I'm one of them. I never did know what
the rules were here. I never did know the right thing to
say, wear or do, and I still don't.
I had hopes of seeing lots of other fat men who were losing hair. But I seemed to be the only one who'd managed both. Most people looked amazingly good, although it can't be fair that Mike Dugan ended up looking that much like Tom Selleck.
One could muse about ironies, how it turns out that a
lot of people you wanted to see weren't there, and that how
there were some people conspicuously present...never mind.
But the ironies turned out not to be so humorous. John
Stein, one of the organizers, got the prize for least
changed.
He also collapsed at the banquet, clutching
his chest. He was rushed to the hospital; I haven't heard
what came next, and I hope he's all right.
What do you find to talk about? I was generally at a
loss. This wasn't like most gatherings of the 1980's. I
didn't hear any bragging about conspicuous wealth or
glamorous careers. Instead, at the cocktail party Friday
night, everyone said You're coming to the picnic
tomorrow, aren't you?
Then at the picnic, You're
coming to the banquet tonight, aren't you?
At the
banquet, You'll come to the 25-year reunion, won't
you?
I kept nodding until I found Martha, out in the lobby with a collection of non-Greeley spouses. They were talking about books, movies, politics. They seemed aware that there was a world beyond Eighth Avenue, and that a few interesting things had occurred since 1968. We joked about the design and bankruptcy of the building we were in -- the Raintree Plaza, whose architect was the firm that the Peña administration has selected to design Denver's new airport.
I finally felt somewhat at ease. I discovered a secret that should be revealed. Everybody feels sorry for the poor, left-out spouses at a reunion. But from what I could tell, they were ones having the best time.
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