Notes from a reunion...

To veterans of the San Rafael High School experience, circa 1964-5, a few notes of interest or disinterest, depending, on the class of ‘64 reunion held Friday and Saturday, those who have survived the years and had the inclination and circumstance to attend the festivities.

Friday evening was originally a no-host bar –– one pays for one’s own intoxicants –– at San Rafael Joe’s, but this was changed last minute because it turned out a class of escapees from Marin Catholic had actually booked the same place and time. SRHS backed down from this potentially horrific confrontation, which at first struck me as unnecessary given that among our returnees were pretty much the entire offensive line of the Bulldogs’ fall ‘63 MCAL champions, including the Ahern boys, not to mention JBD, who in my opinion is still looking to knock an MC linebacker on his ass, but I changed my views upon the news that we’d switched to a place now called the ‘Peddler’s something-or-other’ which, in golden days, had been Dominic’s Restaurant.

Dominic’s was the site of the ‘64 senior ball, an event which evokes few specific memories from anyone, in my opinion largely due to the combination of that evening’s inebriated madness and the present day’s deterioration of what Poirot fondly calls the ‘little grey cells’. But it was also a signpost, one of those distinct moments in time shared by many, and the specifics, though few could be conjured (or invented) by the survivors, retained a special sort of electricity.

And so, being there on the water, with the ghost of SRHS hovering over the canal, northeast and lit by a full moon in Aries, there was a gathering, upstairs where we would not startle otherwise unsuspecting restaurant patrons trying to swallow lobster and farm animal on the main floor.

There are the people who aren’t there, the ones we’ve temporarily lost due to their evacuating the corporeal form and the ones we’ve lost because they’ve evacuated the area and maybe that part of their histories. We’d talk about them sometimes. What ever happened to.....

I’ve got a lot of sensory data in my cranium right now from the Friday evening event and from another the following day, a barbeque deep into Sleepy Hollow. It’s hard to know about my class; a reunion is a sort of odd selective grouping, and conversation, though often fun and occasionally illuminating, cannot go on and on, which it needs to do to offer much revelation. Some things are things people need to get around to, and there isn’t that kind of time.

Time, yes, it was there, perched just beyond the pool at the Colson manse. I believe I saw it wink once.