There should be an award for “best metaphor.” Tonight, I said that the chocolate and peanut butter of Ontario and Hesperia politics have mixed before.
Fake being impressed, please.
In other news, I may have (really) developed arthritis at age 36. I may be asking you to suffocate me with a pillow if the pain in my joints doesn’t ease. My hand resembles a flipper in the morning until I choke down sufficient Advil. Tests are being run by the GP here …
It began with a sense of vague unease.
It seems hard to believe I graduated high school 10 years ago. Although I no longer feel close to those days, emotionally or mentally, neither do I feel like someone old enough to be going to his 10th year reunion, as I did on August 16.
Driving to the country club it was to be held at a country club (pay attention to that, as it’s significant), I felt … not trepidation, but a certain low-level annoyance. I’d paid $45 for the privilege of seeing these people again, and I wasn’t sure why.
It wasn’t that my two years at South Lakes High School in Reston, Virginia were unpleasant — I only spent two years there because my family moved quite a bit while I was growing up — but they made little impression on me. I’m a great believer in the idea that there are certain key moments in a person’s life that transform it, and mold the person irrevocably. I can think of perhaps four such key events in my life off the top of my head — traveling, joining Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity, the time spent with my college-era girlfriend, working as a television reporter in college — but attending South Lakes is not one of them.
When I graduated back in 1987, Fairfax County, Va. was the second-richest public school district in America, and now that Orange County, Ca. has gone belly-up, it may be number one. Within the school district, South Lakes is probably the second wealthiest school, full of the children of lawyers, politicos, defense contractors and all the others that make the nation’s capital tick. There was a certain air of self-declared aristocracy amongst my classmates, a certain American classism existing independent of Ivy League schools or “old money.” Like other such groups, they felt a sense of entitlement as we graduated, as though the world was destined to give to us what we so clearly deserved.
Although I was friends with a number of such “A-list” people in high school, I was never really one of them. I had numerous friends — finding the popularity my senior year of high school that had previously escaped me — but they were scattered across grades and cliques, “cool” people, brains, artsy types and partiers.
As I pulled into the country club parking lot, Jimmy Buffett blasting from the stereo but unable to take the edge off my mood, I noticed with a sigh the convertible BMWs, Acuras and Volvos in the parking lot. My hard-working Hyundai was the only car of its brand in the lot.
The crowd was classically South Lakes, or at least the image the students had of themselves: Nearly all white, well-educated, and upper middle class sophisticated. It was essentially a really nice fraternity or sorority mixer, only without the music or the likelihood of anyone having sex with someone they didn’t come with.
I was there, hoping it’d be more fun than I feared, wanting to see about a half-dozen different people. I can only remember the names of three of my teachers. One I don’t wish to ever see again, or only to back over her with my car if I do, and the other two didn’t show. This was to set the tone for the evening.
About 568 people were in my graduating class (the figure has become hazy over the course of a decade) and 168 showed up. Alas, they were mostly the “A-List” people, and not my more interesting classmates. The classmates who showed, giving air kisses and squeezing biceps, actually kissing cheeks when they were really excited, were mostly pressed from a single mold, wearing the same few outfits — nearly all the women wore demure black cocktail dresses, except for one classmate seemingly showing off her boob job — with their hair neatly coifed the same way and telling the same stories over and over again.
Flipping through a list of classmates, as I sipped my single complimentary soda (I was not going to spend $2.75 for another), I saw that my senior prom date now lived in Las Vegas, where she’s presumably pursuing her singing career. Another high school friend of mine had moved to Phoenix. Neither were in attendance that evening.
The person I would have loved to spent the evening catching up with, telling her about all I’d done since last we talked, was absolutely not coming, as Aislinn has been dead for six years, a loss that still stings.
So I mingled, nodding and saying “hey, how ya doin’ to a succession of classmates who were, in most respects, the same as they always were. True, the women were typically a little heavier, and for all the cracks my family makes about my hairline, most of the men had lost far more of their hair than I have mine.
I ate with a friend whom I see periodically around the DC area, and ran into a few other people I was glad to see. But one encounter in particular sums up the whole of the experience, and what South Lakes means to me today.
[Old junk snipped. It’s been 10 years since I wrote this and 20 years since high school. No point in leaving this out there where it’ll cause unintended and thoughtless pain.]
I left feeling calm, untouched by anything I had seen or done that evening.
I got a diploma from South Lakes High School 10 years ago, but when I walked out its doors into the hot Washington summer, I left it behind. It recedes more and more in my rear-view mirror with each passing day. It’s where I came from, but it bears no impact on where I’m going.
