So last weekend I went to my high school reunion.   It was the 200th anniversary of the founding of the school.  I was in the unusual position of having graduated from Jarvis twice, once in 1964 and once in 1966.  Apparently the first time wasn’t good enough for me.  In addition, I knew some of the people who graduated ahead of me.

I saw two of my old basketball coaches, Marv Pearl and Tom Watt.  Tom is a scout for the Florida Panthers so I made a pitch for a spot on the team.  I don’t think he bought it.

I saw a few of my old teachers, particularly Mr. Hall who had a huge impact on many of us.  People who meet me today are astonished that I learned to speak French that well in Toronto.   He was probably the main reason I was able to do so.  Not sure if he completely recognized me though.

As to my classmates, where were all these fabulous and interesting people when I was going to school?  Actually they were all there.  We just hadn’t lived yet.  I, myself was so preoccupied with my inner turmoil and self-importance that I didn’t take the time to get to know them well enough.

There was Helen Valk, who graduated ahead of me in Commercial who had gone on to live in many countries and to travel the world and who is now an artist in Vernon, B.C.  How stupid that in those days we academic types sometimes looked down on those who didn’t follow the academic stream.  Those things seem so irrelevant now while at the time I was consumed by them.  In those days, too, I would have thought she was too good looking and mature to talk to me.   And she probably was.

There was Bob Read, who I saw often at school but I obviously did not know well enough.  In my e-mail to him, I told him that in those days I thought of him as one of the whitest people I knew.  Go figure.  Now he is a man with a successful career as a reggae singer in Jamaica and a following in Russia.

There was Michael Jordan, who I did not remember as being Jewish in high school but who reminded me that he married one of the girls I dated a few times in high school.  He told me that she had shown him a picture of us on one of those dates.   I was sad to hear she died and found that her son had put up a memorial page to her on the web.  The strange thing is I still have the same picture in my own album. 

Looking at her picture, I realize that what is the most challenging thing to integrate is how we have all travelled forward in time, that each of us has lived so many experiences not shared by the others and yet we still share that common origin in the sixties, which has fundamentally shaped our memories, our identities and probably, our values 

It would be interesting to see whether that common root could keep us talking to each other for longer than the few hours we spent together on the weekend.

In general, our faces are so much more interesting now.  Some are fundamentally changed, weathered, full of substance and story that I wish I knew.  Some have the same essential features but are obviously older.  And a few seem hardly to have changed at all. 

Here is my overall impression.  Many of my contemporaries have pursued careers in the arts, in creativity.  A huge number have either been or are now teachers and educators.  Those who have not are still very interesting people in their own right.  What a diverse and fascinating universe I wish I had taken the time to explore more thoroughly in the past.

Some like Tonu and Eva and Taida and Chris, I have talked to occasionally over the years so their personae have a certain continuity in my consciousness.  With others, I had to fill in forty odd years in about a half hour.

Lorna Bins came up to me to make sure I told my older brother, Shelly, she still remembered how he gave her her first kiss while she and he and Chuck Simpson (who I was talking to when she came up to tell me this) and Gord Chong and Eileen McDougall and Bob Bagby sat in a tent in Bob’s back yard playing spin the bottle.

Bob was my next door neighbour and my brother’s best bud in elementary school.  I met two of his ex-girl friends at the reunion.  I did not talk much with Leora who seems to have come to the reunion from Israel (others came from Australia and Switzerland) but managed to talk with Nina Keogh who has done so much creatively over the years.  She filled me in a bit on what happened to Bob after elementary school and how he and his father ended up in Regent Park.

I talked to Matti Ingerman, still with those large and intense blue eyes but now surrounded by mounds of grey hair, a beard and wrinkles instead of a blonde, blonde dutch boy cut and a smooth baby face.  Ah what experiences lie behind that transformation?

Eva Hoeberechts-Johnson told me that she went to grade seven and eight with my first girl friend, Eva Jalava so that was another connection made that I did not know about before.

It is astonishing to me how similar some of us are to what we were then.  Maybe it is just that we fell into our accustomed roles when we talked to each other.  Ian Hambleton still had the same amused look on his face, which had not changed much, that he had in 1964 when he was studying maths and sciences.  Andy Rubenis looked so much like his earlier self it was scary.  Brian and Chris and Marilyn sounded to me almost exactly the same as I remembered them but now softened by a wrinkle or two around the eye or mouth, muted only slightly by 40 odd more years of living.  While it is true, as Brian said, that Marilyn now has breasts, so do I.

I wonder if any of us could have predicted in the sixties what life had in store, both the bitter and the sweet.  We survived and then some.  And that, of itself is something to celebrate.