First off, to the graduating high school classes of 2010, I'm sorry about the commencement speeches. Oh, there have been some humdingers along the way, I suppose, but most of them will not be stamped in memory with anything ever spoken in Gettysburg or even with Uncle Jake's memorable toast at the family Christmas dinner when he went face first into the chestnut stuffing. It's not the fault of the speechmaker, who is doing his or her best to offer wisdom to some 18-year-olds who are at that moment primarily concerned with putting on the shorts and flip-flops and getting out of town.
It's hard to blame them. Let's face it: High school is fun for a fairly small fraction of people. Athletes, beauty queens, whiz kids whose primary worry is whether they'll beat 1,500 on the math-verbal S.A.T. It is decidedly no fun if you are too short, too tall, too fat, too skinny, shy, homely or without transportation. By my calculation, one of those appellations applies to just about everyone.
Of the 575 members of my 1970 graduating class at R.J. Reynolds High School in Winston-Salem, approximately 20 were cool kids, who appeared in all the clubs and on all the teams in the annual, and made it to the back pages all dressed up as the best couple or the most likely to succeed or whatever. (The specifics are somewhere, maybe, in a cardboard box, and the annual I found recently was so grimy you wouldn't go near it without a Hazmat suit.)
Ah, "in my day." Swore I'd never say it. Also swore I'd never say "when I was your age" or "you'll understand when you have kids." But I actually managed to put them all in a single sentence once: "Drive carefully, because when I was your age, you know, in my day, I never would have thought of speeding and you'll understand that when you have kids."
I have no graduations to attend this year, but I do have two invitations, one to my 40th reunion at Reynolds and the other to the 40th reunion for Raleigh's Needham Broughton, where I attended 10th grade and might have finished except for a temporary family move to Winston-Salem. It made for a strange time. I wasn't at Reynolds long enough to build many lifelong friendships and I left Broughton about the time those friendships, which had begun in kindergarten and carried on through that one year, were beginning to solidify.
That's likely the reason I've not attended any previous reunions. This year, I'm going to both. Time mellows things and evens life's playing field. Even the cool kids have had a few knocks by their late 50s. Virtually everyone will have some things in common, from business successes and failures to kidney stones to maintenance medications. Perspective will give us all a moment to consider what, if given the chance, we might tell the latest graduates:
Life isn't going to turn out like you now expect it will. You probably won't marry your high school sweetheart. In fact, at the 40th reunion you may not recognize her and she may not recognize you.
The football and basketball stars will age just like everybody else, some will be successful, some not so much, with some struggles along the way that will make their past triumphs seem more and more distant.
You may be the only bald classmate at the 10th reunion. You won't be at the 40th.
Right now, you laugh when you and your mates make fun of a middle-aged guy by calling him "Pops." Eventually, you'll love it when your grandson calls you that.
Now you think you'll be forever as quick on the racquetball court and the dance floor as you are now. Chances are, however, that you won't go out of here with all the original parts with which you arrived.
You've always thought you'd dread running into the girl who broke your heart in 11th grade. But her name will escape you.
The bully who picked on everyone will at some reunions hence seem rather small and meek. And his kids will be driving him nuts.
When you see all the cool kids gathered in one corner at the reunion, you'll wonder, what was the big deal?
And you will know the answer: There wasn't one.
