This weekend was my 35th high school reunion. I ruled out the idea of going pretty soon after I heard about it; I knew I'd be teaching my summer class until the day before it started, and it seemed like it would be a scramble to get to southern West Virginia in time. My friend Angela was going, but I wasn't sure how many other friends I would see there. I graduated in a class of 424, which means there are a lot of vaguely familiar names and faces, with fewer and fewer true connections as the years go by.
So I didn't go, but then I spent the whole weekend looking for new pictures and updates and surfing a strange tsunami of nostalgia.
I have a lot of Feelings about West Virginia. I was eager to leave the state the entire time I lived there, and at the same time it still feels like home. One of my friends posted a picture of her tray at the King Tut Drive-In, which still looks a whole lot like it did in the 1980s. "SLAW DOGS!" I commented. "Wonder how far I'd have to drive to get a slaw dog?"
Are slaw dogs just a West Virginia thing? You doll up your hot dog with chili, cole slaw, chopped raw onion, and yellow mustard if you can abide it (I cannot). In my experience most people outside of West Virginia think (or at least my husband thinks) that the idea of cole slaw on a hot dog is pretty weird, but most people are wrong about that. It gives you a little crunch, a little sweetness, a little contrast. I've spent most of my adult life in a hot dog landscape dominated by Chicago-style dogs, which will never not seem weird to me. I saw that picture of a drive-in slaw dog and I could practically taste it: the softness of the bun, the kick of the chili, the bite of the onion, the hint of slaw dressing.
That is an odd nostalgia trigger for a person who might eat a hot dog once every ten years, but nostalgia is a strange and unpredictable phenomenon.
When I posted about our 25th reunion I mentioned the number of classmates who had died. That number was never going to go anywhere but up, and yet I couldn't quite get my mind around this year's In Memoriam board. Since our 25th reunion, eleven more of our classmates have died. I've posted about a couple of them: the woman who died in an appalling domestic violence incident, the theater pal whose absence still pulls me up short. I wasn't close to any of them, and yet it is so strange to see their yearbook pictures next to dates of death. They were arranged chronologically, and I zoomed in and scrolled through them one by one.
I had the good fortune to be 20 years old, and then 30, and 40, and 50-- and they did not.
The past couple of years have taken an especially heavy toll; there are too many deaths from 2020 and beyond. One man emerged briefly from his COVID delirium at the height of the Delta wave to post on Facebook, begging someone to pick him up at our hometown hospital and take him home. It seemed like a sign that he was getting better-- and then he was gone.
We seem so much older now, all of us. Maybe it's because that decade between your early 40s and your early 50s is the window when most people go gray; maybe it's the result of all those 1980s hours spent lying in the sun slathered in baby oil. I zoomed in on a nametag and recoiled in shock-- that white-haired guy is...RICK?
That white-haired guy was indeed Rick.
Ten years ago Stella was only 3, and Alex was only 15, and when I think about all the things that have happened between then and now I suppose it is unremarkable that I have more lines around my eyes (so much laughter) and across my forehead (so many surprises, so many worries). I have not set foot in that little West Virginia town in the intervening ten years -- and I had not been back for 18 years before that -- but I could still tell you exactly how to navigate the streets that wind and swoop through the mountains. I know just how to get to the reunion venue, and to the drive-in with its slaw dogs, and then back to the brick house built into a hill, in the neighborhood where I used to live.
It hasn't been my parents' house since 1995. But somehow, unexpectedly, it all still seems like home.
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