Leslie's High School Reunion
by Leslie Strom
People get to make jokes about Tacoma. Perhaps it's not deserved but it's sort of a given, like jokes about New Jersey. They can revive the downtown, sport the largest wooden geodesic dome in the world, claim Weyerhaeuser, Almond Roca, blues singer Robert Cray, and open Dale Chihuly's somewhat pretentious Museum of Glass, but it's still... Tacoma.
Mention Tacoma and I remember the sulphur stench in the air nearly every day from the pulp mills ("The Aroma of Tacoma"), Ivan the sad captive gorilla at the B&I department store, and Lakes, the high school from which I graduated.
The class of '72 reunion starts on a Friday evening at the high school itself. Though I would probably have not recognized many of these people out of context, my old classmates look pretty much the way they did when we were 17, only... older. Four of our old state championship rifle team find one another immediately. We look in the trophy case for our old trophies and pictures of our team, and find none. The school principal, a man possibly younger than us, tells us that there has been no rifle team since 1992.
A few of us stand around marvelling at the passage of 30 years when down the sidewalk, toward the building, comes 18 year old classmate Cindi Munt. Wait. We're not 18. We're 48. We're good with that. But this is just unfair. Cindi has made a deal with the devil. There's a Dorian Gray-type portrait in a closet somewhere featuring a 48-year-old Cindi, and here comes the deal she made. Long blonde hair, perfect teeth and tan, athletic bouncy figure, jeans and tank top right out of the '70s. We all stare. Then we look a little bit to the left edge of the sidewalk. It's a twin, another one who made a deal with the devil, just a little older. They come closer. They're laughing their heads off over the looks on our faces. Cindi's daugher Ashleigh, at 17, is a dead ringer for Cindi at the same age.
A small crew of current Lakes students shows us around our old school, which actually looks pretty good. The open breezeway is now roofed over, but everything is the same. "Was there a pool when you went here?" one of our student hosts asks. "Yes, and there was also electricity," someone snaps. "How long do you think it's been?" Um. Thirty years?
We walk into the swimming pool and stand in the blue light, water reflections swimming on the cinderblock walls. Most of us knew this place well. No kid escaped the required semester of swim class. Swim coach Mr. Stouffer, perpetually in shorts, t-shirt and whistle, still teaches swimming at Lakes. Scuba club. Swim team. Senior lifesaving. Long merciless swim tests. The baskets of regulation black tank suits in size 32. Yes, we were that slim, not done growing. The high dive is gone, probably for the same reason the rifle team is gone. I have a fleeting memory of my classmates, pale and unformed teenaged bodies, slipping through the water, no swim caps for us, thank you, effortless as river otters.
The gymnasium seems small. Can we have had those school dances in this very room that seemed massive then? Cindi reminds us of her failed audition for cheerleader. I don't confess to a similar failed attempt at getting a place on the drill team, and my hopeless effort to learn a routine to the theme to "Hawaii 5-0."
We pop into the library. "Look! Computers! We used to have wax tablets and styli! Then we upgraded to parchment and quill pens!" Our student host indulges my old-person joke with a little smile.
Mark MacGougan and I break from the crowd and look for the old journalism room. Same room, only with a couple computers where the wax-filled electric frying pan and galley paste-up station used to be. Mark's dad Denny, now retired, was for years a humor columnist for the Tacoma News Tribune. The whole family is funny. "So are you writing like your dad?" someone asks Mark. "I work for an insurance company," says Mark. "You're not making a living being funny? Funny insurance maybe?"
We all gather later at a pub that used to be the Shakey's pizza parlor. There's no pizza any more. Jimmy Fjelsted and his wife arrived in the Rude Stude - a Studebaker he drove in high school. Jim is immediately recognizable - still moderating his persistent wild side, chain smoking, and the unchanged glacier-blue eyes. His wife is the only person in the room who looks like she could keep up with the guy.
Mike Morrison joins us at a table for a few beers. He was very sweet and painfully shy in school. He's still shy and yet there he is, powering, muscling his way through that shyness like a hunting dog running through tall grass. Mike Bibo and his wife Patti Lanzon (both from our class) point out people they're not sure about. Mike goes on fact finding missions with every unanswered question, returning to our amazement with information. Only a bit of perspiration gives away how hard he's working. We can't all have Jimmy's comfort with being outgoing but while watching Mike, I realize that for the most part, faking it is pretty much equal to natural ability.
Rex Bond, now a successful architect in Seattle, is off dancing (quite well) with my former next door neighbor Vicki Ryse. Vicki, a brooding teen with a love of animals and a fascinating dark side, who would have been the Janeane Garofalo character from "Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion," had become a police officer and still keeps horses somewhere in California.
Tyler Woods, fun and always ready for action, now is heading for a new career as a minister after years at Boeing. In a matter of ten minutes he tells me a few anecdotes that suddenly make my own future seem organized and bright. Helping people find the right path seems to come naturally to him. He also seems to have found his own.
Off in a corner are a couple former football stars, segregated from the rest, drinking a bit too much. For them, this gathering may have been harder, a reminder of things missing in their lives. For the rest of us was a happy realization that we'd all come through just fine. Not much to regret, no longing to relive those teenage years, and swimming in the blue glow of how it feels to be in the company of familiar faces feeling strangely at home. Even if that home is in Tacoma.
Having
no marriages, no kids, no grandchildren, no home, and a hard-to-define
career at being a wastrel, Get Lost Magazine editor Leslie Strom
waited in vain for her "Least Improved" prize at the
reunion dinner dance.
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