Cocktails on the Carpathia

In a long since out of print book called “Is There Life After High School”, the late Frank Zappa is quoted as saying that “High School is not a time or a place, but a state of mind”. Well on September 19, 2009, I had the opportunity to revisit that state of mind known as high school as I attended a pre-high school reunion mixer. Since I am from out of town, and the chances of anyone from my hometown reading this are pretty slim, just as the chances of anyone from the Lansdale area knowing anyone from the Steinert High School Class of 79 are pretty slim, I feel somewhat safe writing this article.

My friends and I from this era are a lost generation of sorts, we are too young to remember when Kennedy was shot and entirely too old to even be remotely interested in any band that came along after Guns N Roses-and even that is a stretch. Our older brothers and sisters of the late sixties had Woodstock and the Summer of Love, Viet Nam and Nixon to rally against, we had Three Mile Island and Jimmy Carter, and the closest thing that we could muster to pass as social consciousness was a 1979 Musicians United for Safer Energy (MUSE) concert at Madison Square Garden . It was rock and roll making a statement against nuclear power. Truth be told, we could not have cared less about safer energy or nuclear power we just wanted to see Bruce Springsteen play as he was the headliner and tickets were nearly impossible to come by.

In high school, I was the classic under achiever, a straight C student who never once uttered the words “will there be extra credit on this assisgnment”, a geek to the core, I stood in awe of the football players and the cheerleaders, the anointed chosen ones of all high school classes, not feeling worthy to look them in the eye, let alone attempt a friendship with any of them. It’s funny when you think about it, the almost universal hatred of cheerleaders. Talk to anyone who was not a cheerleader or anyone who never dated a cheerleader and the response is pretty much universal, first a groan, then a statement of a wish that they are now all fat and unhappy when truth be told, most cheerleaders were really nobody more than girls lucky enough to be good at gymnastics.

Not being invited to one single party or social event in all of high school, I reverted into the fantasy world of my bedroom A world that was adorned with posters of Humprhey Bogart and Bruce Springsteen, two men I idolize to this day. I would have given anything to have had Bogart’s self assurance, dry wit and fighting ability, and Bruce Springsteen, well he sung to me about escaping the small town in New Jersey I grew up in. If Bruce Springsteen, a bus drivers son from Freehold, could find his Rosalita and walk in the sun, well then there was hope for an acne faced kid like myself.

I spent many a night in high school dreaming of the revenge I was going to wreak on the class of 1979. Don’t worry readers, not revenge of the Carrie type, I had (and to this day still don’t have) any desire to see any of my classmates covered in pigs blood (okay, maybe one or two), but I thought for sure I would somehow transform myself into a swashbuckling, Academy Award winning modern day Errol Flynn and pull up to my high school reunion in a long black limo and rub my success in everyone’s faces. Needless to say, Hollywood never called and I don’t have an Academy Award (I did however manage a small walk on part in the Bruce Willis movies 12 Monkeys as the guard who while goofing off reading a newspaper, allows Bruce Willis to escape the mental hospital. My three seconds of screen time and later a vacation to Universal Studios in California were about as close as I was gonna get to my “run away American Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences dream”.

As any reader, say, over the age of maybe 35 knows, life does not always work out the way we planned. John Lennon said it best when he said “life is what happens when we are making plans”, and oh did life happen. Life happened to all of us and thirty years later our Senior Prom theme of Always and Forever should be renamed “Cocktails on the Carpathia (the ship that rescued the survivors of the Titantic).

In the thirty years since we have graduated, my classmates and I have pretty much managed to make a mess of our lives, and yet like the Energizer Bunny in the commercial, we keep on going. Out of a class of over 400, there are multiple divorces, countless dui’s, stints at rehab, affairs gone awry (as all affairs do), unrealized dreams and that does not even take into consideration the agony of watching helplessly as our kids make the same mistakes we made, and we watch knowing that there is nothing we can say that will help them avoid the pitfalls of life, those mistakes you make in your twenties, that you carry with you for the rest of your life.

You can say a lot of things about the Steinert High School Class of 79, but let me say for the record, we are survivors and have earned our place on the Carpathia doing everything we could think of to secure our place on a lifeboat with limited seating, and unlike our predecessors on the Titanic, that ill fated floating caste system commandeered by Captain Edward Smith, social standing and who you know had nothing to do with our ability to survive.

Our high school reunions seemed to have gone through this curious, yet reaffirming transformation over the years. For the first ten to twenty years, we all stood around strutting our stuff, each of us trying to impress the other. Who had the best car, the biggest house, the best paying job, yet during our 25th reunion, there seemed to be a non spoken shift in allegiances. Our In Memoriam Wall, the wall reserved for those classmates who have passed away, seemed to have nearly doubled in the last ten years. It seemed that addiction, AIDS, cancer and other assorted untimely deaths had affected us, and all of a sudden it did not matter if you were a jock, a geek or the class president (who I might add, in one of the strangest twists of fate in my life is now one of my best friends-go figure), all that mattered was that you showed up, you were healthy and you made the effort to show up.

At the25th reunion, there was a very strange pall hanging over the catering hall. Where in the past we beat our chests and struted our stuff, this time around we seemed to wander around with expressions on our faces akin to deer caught in headlights. It was like we were all asking ourselves “Is this it? Is this what life has given us?”. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of people in my class who are happy, plenty of people who’s marriages have not only survived, but have actually thrived and plenty of people with children who’s accomplishments are that which make a parent proud. But for many of us, the question of the night seemed to be “what happened”? Had we really turned into characters from Brue Springsteen songs, not factory workers, but mostly white collar workers, but with the same worries and disapointments that Mr. Springsteen has made a career singing about.

Five years have passed since our 25th reunion and so much has changed in the world. We have witnessed the election of the first African American man to the White House (though some, if not all, of my Republican friends are not too happy with this-not because the president is black, but because he is a Democrat-guess what guys-the country swings one way one election, and then the opposite way another election, you guys will get your chance again), we have seen our country go to war yet again, so many of our pensions and retirement savings were effected by the stock market crash of 2008, but the one change that seems to have had the biggest effect on my class has been the internet, and social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace. My best friend in the world, Dawn Sizemore Breza, a Republican to my Democrat, and I often joke that Facebook is the evil love child of Al Gore and George Bush. Al Gore who claims to have invented the internet, and George Bush for his Patriot Act which allows the president and the CIA with more access to our personal information. Once thought of as merely social outlets for teenagers and college kids, Facebook alone has brought together more people in my class than anything else. Through the wonder of technology, old friends, old acquaintances and friends of friends have re-connected in such a way that though in some cases we are separated by many miles, we are able to build relationships with one another on a day to day basis, and that ability to build relationships was just not there, or if was there, was not as popular as it is today.

I guess the point I am trying to make, is that those of us on the Carpathia, those of us who survived the iceberg of life are now huddled together, sharing blankets, and sharing our strengths, exposing our weaknesses and just becoming friends. In high school, we are set in a caste system that is harder break then anything that Calcutta can offer, yet thirty years later, it seems that caste system no longer exists, and recovering geeks like myself, can slow dance with two of the prettiest girls that ever graced the halls of Steinert High School, and I can see the Captain of the football team and former class president and enjoy a friendly hug and a hearty laugh at an inside joke we share about his resemblance to Commander Virgil Tracey, a puppet from a 1960’s children show called “Thunderbirds Are Go”.

So often when we think of the past, we romanticize it, we think of our teenage years as our golden years, we were so young and innocent then. Young, yes, innocent, not the class of 79, that is for sure. When I think about who we were, who I was in high school, innocence does not come to mind. No, we were a bunch of self indulgent, narcissistic, catty, selfish jealous brats. Long ago, the Greek philosopher Socrates bemoaned the state of teenagers, calling them lazy and selfish. Socrates was right, we were lazy and we were selfish, caring only for our immediate needs with no concept of the world around us.

Thankfully, at least as far as the Steinert High School Class of 1979 goes, that has all changed. Don’t get me wrong readers, we have not transformed ourselves into a sect of chaste monks with vows of poverty, but we have learned lessons, lessons that could never have been taught to us in high school or even college. We have learned what it is to be a friend through thick and thin. We have learned how to cope with the loss of love or the loss of security and we have learned how to be there for one another.

The years have not been real kind to a lot of us. At the age of 47 I became a widower, another classmate of mine watched her husband die of a heart attack while playing basketball, some have lost children, some of us (including myself) have lost our homes and are either living with family members or in apartments. So many of us are feeling the crunch of the economy, our once thriving businesses are slowing down and even dying, yet something in us tells us to keep on going, to keep showing up.

I look at my former classmates so much differently now. I no longer feel any competition with any of them, I feel no glee or joy at a cheerleader or ex jock with a weight problem and my heart goes out to any class members who have lost loved ones such as I have. I used to think of my high school reunions as a way of showing off, now I see them as a way of showing up. The late John F. Kennedy in his now famous inaugural address baited Americans to ask not what your country can do for you, but what can you do for your country. Regardless of your feelings about the late president, he had a point. I now ask myself what can I offer to my classmates? How can I help them?. We have seen it all, my class of 79 classmates, we have been through the perfect storm and we have made it to the other side.

Our actual class reunion is scheduled for November and it will be interesting to see who shows up and if they feel the same way I do. Despite the various drama surrounding our pre reunion get together, it was apparent to me that so many of us learned that now more than ever, we need to have each others backs.

Readers, life is precious and short. One minute you are 17 at the Spectrum watching Bruce Springsteen, and in a blink of an eye, he is on the cover of the latest AARP magazine. We live in a age where tracking down lost friends is easier than it has ever been and I urge you all to do so. Put down the old petty resentments, forgive and ask to be forgiven. I used to base my self worth on my career and the amount of money I made. No longer. I may not have a skill set that can bring in a high six figure salary, but I can help a friend in need. God bless, and Godspeed the Steinert High School Class of 1979.