Time Travel For Dummies

 

This is a picture of downtown Suffern, New York from a fifteenth story window that faces North in the Mahwah Sheraton, that rocket looking building you see where the I-287 meets Route 17 and the New York State Thruway.

I grew up in a pass-through town.

But it was a fine one. In fact, I feel very lucky to have grown up there as my family (including me) had been living in a less gemutlichkeit place only five miles away until I finished the fifth grade. I had no friends in the old town. I mostly bought black mollies for my aquarium, nursed their Ick infections, played pop songs on my guitar in my bedroom and read Peanuts classics.

But then we moved to Suffern where the kids were a little more old fashioned, certainly more friendly, smarter, engaged, fresh faced, even beautiful and generally positive. And I made friends there and I still have friends from this place. Spent seven great formative years, had a class trip to Paris, worked summers in a truck stop, then headed off to Boston for college. It was not traumatic, any of this. It was, at times, depressing. It was usually fun. It certainly was a great place to take all those good high school classes and join things, whatever you were into. It was well funded. It was quite a building with a planetarium and an indoor pool and a monster theatre and, well, I just have to say it, ramps. And all kinds of kids went there---a cross section---like something you would find at a decent suburban DMV. Plus, I think we were section 9 champions in every sport but curling, or something.

Now, reunions. You know, it is best going expecting nothing. This keeps you more in the moment. You just leave yourself open to the field. You go on the Easter Egg hunt and you find all these people that you knew when they were only eleven years old, some people that you’ve known since they were twelve and then some since they were fourteen, depending on what year your classes merged together. (And now, all these years later, as you hop around with your basket, you have to accept that it is the women who all still get to keep their hair.)

I drank a lot of water the week before I went, thinking it might help with that puff-face thing. Did not get too much sleep the night before. Ironed my shirt.

I like a party. I like talking to people. I am what I would call warmly shallow. Having lived in California for years where people are absolutely warmly shallow, I have come to enjoy the breeziness of these drive-by encounters with others.

But then, at times, you see someone and their image lights up a part of your brain, a memory, and your emotional life is re-contextualized. And it’s good to let that happen, that slide into the past, because there IS context there, a place of connection, and isn’t that why people go to reunions? Not as a study of specimens but as a kind of awakening of younger and less jaded (or tired) parts of the self? I think so. It is a very enjoyable experience. And all the people around you are doing the same and they reveal things to you like “The first time I did this or that adolescent wrong doing was WITH YOU!” Ah, but you do not take any blame. If it hadn’t been me, it would have been someone else! And people get a little embarrassed. Some people want to fall in love again. Some people profess their crushes that they had, all of that. (None of that for me.) So the breeziness gets deeper.

I spoke for a while with another guy from my class who was also gay. It was very comforting.

I got to talk to some “Mounties” that I really did not know at all. And I certainly had complete conversations with people that I knew very well. Facebook helps. It re-solidifies. In fact, some sociologists are saying that Facebook is actually getting people to spend MORE time in the flesh with other people. Could be…

Glad I went. It was warm hearted. It was open hearted, even. And though at times it felt freaky, that was only when you thought about it too much. Because really, it’s just a middle aged prom, except you don’t have to have a date, you can afford it, you can wear something that is hanging in your closet, and you don’t have to go down to the Jersey Shore afterward and rent some filthy house for two or three nights.

And there is humor. A lot of it.