High School Reunions & Those Absent, but Not Truly Gone

Series Introduction: For our 45th high school reunion in 2013, we made stand up table displays of our departed classmates.  We also solicited written tributes and memories from their friends and classmates, and we displayed the photo tributes on decorated tables and placed the written memories on the tables next to the photo of the departed classmate for others to read.  Inevitably, we now add more tributes at each five-year reunion.  The cover photo of this posting is a collage of the photo tributes we have made over the years.

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As I reread the tributes I wrote in 2013, and other writings I wrote on departed classmates over the years, in order to begin preparing them as postings for my website, some of the emotions I experienced when I was initially preparing the photo tributes in 2013 again surfaced within me.  One warm summer evening while I worked on them, I paused for a moment and all of a sudden, I was flooded with a sense that I was dealing with the remains of my departed classmates.  A feeling of sadness for how some of them died, and for all these lives with experience and years shorter than mine, came over me, mingled with a quiet yet reluctant and grieved acceptance of the reality of our fragile life and its inevitable passing.  After much thought and reflection, I eventually returned to my work on the photo tributes, but with a greater reverence and care for what I was now accomplishing on behalf of the memory of my departed classmates.  

I also experienced a sense of unreality within all of this, and not so much that I was handling their physical remains, but the reality that I was preparing photo tributes for classmates – friends, acquaintances, those who I knew very little beyond their names – for persons who I knew as once alive and breathing, joking and hurting, nice and total jerks, at the time in our lives when we were perhaps most alive in that intense present moment of life, where everything was new and immediate – the joys, disappointments, loves and lusts, and undefined fears and hopes – this life we all shared either alone or together, but mostly both at the same time. 

Today I still deeply remember that intenseness of life of our high school days, an incubation period for most of us, the last dress rehearsal before stepping into “real” life, whatever we individually thought that was and would be.  But, now, these classmates are dead – such a final word – and gone, not to return in this life, but still…not really gone.  For because of our shared life together, at times blessed and many times not, their lives – the good, the broken, the deep and beautiful and giddy, the painful and difficult – are and will always be intertwined with ours, yes, and are now essential DNA of our lives, of our mind and soul.

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Harold, a Memory

It seems I always knew Harold in high school, though I am not sure how I knew him.  We didn’t go to the same Catholic grammar school, so I think it must have been because we were both in the freshman honors classes – early in the morning.

I always knew Harold was intelligent.  I was smart and picked up on things fast – except math – but Harold was more than smart, he was intelligent, he always seemed to see and understand things deeper and more quietly.  And he was quiet, at least as far as our interaction went, for we were not friends in the sense that we had contact outside of our classes together, but later I came to wish we had been friends because of the things inside of him. 

I remember once I was talking – at least I think I was – and I was standing and Harold was sitting down and I glanced over to him and he was just looking at me and his face was quiet, and about his face there was a sadness, but a sadness with depth, maybe with understanding and I thought – or at least the experience was there – that his quietness and sadness was about both of us and whatever he saw when he looked at me was not bad, but maybe accurate and with understanding and whatever it was it seemed to have resonance within him.  And through high school it wasn’t that I “liked” Harold – it was more than that – it was more that I trusted him, and I didn’t mind if he really saw me, for if he did it was ok, he didn’t turn away and there seemed to be a quiet understanding on his part.

Now Harold was always overweight.  I knew that; we were probably in the same P.E. class in freshman year, and then he would have been one of the last to finish running around the track.  I don’t think the coaches were kind to Harold – being the way of coaches during the time.  In being last, and being overweight, he was of course defenseless to whatever was said or shouted by the coaches.  I don’t think us boys were mean to him.  If it wasn’t him, it would have been one of us.  Maybe that knowledge produces sympathy in fourteen-year-old boys – or something akin to it.  And Harold had to endure the remarks and shouts all the time during that first year.  And he did it quietly and did what he could but even then, I knew it was hard for him.  I wasn’t good at anything athletic, but I was smart, I was able to figure ways to cover it over.  But Harold was defenseless.

I remember meeting and talking to Harold at the beginning of our junior or senior year and, lo and behold, Harold was slimmed down and thin and trim and I said basically wow, how did this happen?  And Harold looked at me and with his quiet fixed look – almost without expression – he carefully told me how he had gone to a camp for overweight children/teens and had basically spent the summer losing weight.  And as he spoke and looked at me, there still seemed that sadness – was it of his own life, or was it of me and if so, what was it he saw when he looked at me?  I remember thinking as he was speaking – wow, his parents must have had money to send him away for the summer, (I had never been to camp in my life), how honest it was of him to tell me these things, and did others ask him also?  And my final and lasting thought was how brave Harold was for what he did and even in telling me these things he was brave; hard things to do and hard things to tell someone else – and to me, hard especially to talk of these things, because by then I did not speak to others of the deeper, harder things of my life, my walls were already there.  I completely admired Harold for what he did and also for telling me.  And he and all his hard work and triumphs and doing things that I would never do was seminal in my own understanding of what it really was to be brave.

Harold and I had some kind of continuing relationship throughout the rest of our high school life.  I think he might have put back on some of his weight, but not all of it.  It came time to take the SAT tests and I signed-up to take the test at UCLA.  My parents couldn’t take me, and I needed a ride.  I think I was asking around and Harold said he was going to UCLA and that he was going to drive.  I think he also said his parents said he needed to go with someone.  I thought this was great and he asked if I would go with him.  So we went together, and I think I had to do the navigating as part of the deal.  I got a map and got us to UCLA.  We took the test; we might have been in different rooms.  After the test, we met up on the main steps of UCLA and walked to the car to drive home.  We got to the car and Harold discovered he had locked his keys in the car and said we had to find a phone to phone his father who would not be happy about having to come down.  This seemed to make Harold sad, but he seemed resigned to this.  But I noticed the driver’s window was open a bit and – being smart – I had the idea to take off my belt and lower the buckle part down the window and try to get it hooked on the lock button and pull it up.  Harold was expressionless but watched as I tried it and, lo and behold, it worked and I unlocked the car.  Harold might have been impressed; I certainly was as I usually wasn’t that smart!  And then he drove me back to Alemany so my parents could pick me up.

That was my last interaction with Harold that I remember, and I don’t think he has come to any of the reunions, but I don’t remember.  I was saddened when I had heard he had died.  I wondered what he died of and how his life had been, for just in the times of our few interactions I had gained much.

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