Attending an all-school reunion is hard work.
At mine recently, I found that even though we all had plenty on the ball, most of us were just too tired to bounce it.
I found myself struggling to compete with loud bands and small name tags bearing words in very small type that I later learned identified actual people.
Nothing like an all-school reunion to show how time changes everything.
I ran into an old friend I hadn’t seen for years who had aged so much he didn’t recognize me. He handed me an order blank and told me his hobby now was making lawn furniture out of discarded plastic milk cartons.
The music, excellent though it was, made conversation impossible. I didn’t recognize any of the tunes or the words to go with them, but the people with real hair who seemed so much younger than I was at their age were able to follow along with no problem.
I was hoping that the band would at least have played a chorus or two of “Froggy Went-A-Courtin,” but I suppose the composition is too difficult.
Perhaps it was the size of the room that multiplied the decibels and tended to cause older alums to retreat like wrinkled old elephants to the rear of the room. There, in relative safety, we swayed our trunks, picked our teeth and hoped the bathroom was just a few shuffling steps away.
The closer one got to the stage and the band, the younger they tended to be, sort of like the rings of a tree, except reversed. Age, I discovered, is calculated by the square of the distance from where you sit or stand in relationship to the band.
The young ones, of course, stood very close for the entire dance, while the members of the older classes slumped in chairs in the back until their wives woke them up and told them it was time to go.
I left my chair and the safety of geezerdom once and wandered up to the edge of the dance floor to see what was going on. There, a kid who seemed about 12, shoved out his hand and said: “Howyalikedoingdude?” I figured he must have been a foreign exchange student from France, or maybe North Dakota, who hadn’t yet mastered the English language.
I quickly retreated back to my own kind far in the rear where curmudgeons from around the country were camped out, sleeping in or shouting at winkled hands cupped next to gravity-stretched ear lobes hanging on the sides of bald heads, nodding across the table like those little figures you see in rear windows of cars.
“Wanna beer?” I asked a long-lost friend who I think suffers from carpel tunnel syndrome over about 90 percent of his body. “Sure, I can hear,” he said. “I’m not THAT old.”
He never did have much grain in his silo, the old coot.
I asked another old guy whose birthstone was probably petrified wood how he liked the meal. He took exception: “No, it wasn’t veal, you dummy,” he said. “It was pork.” I hope AARP discontinues his membership.
I squinted my eyes to admire an old friend’s wristwatch and ask him what kind it was. He held it at arms length and studied it for a long minute and then told me it was 9:30 p.m.
Funny, it seemed much later than that.
The other sense that abandons you at a reunion is good vision. They don’t make nametags like they once did, in big, gaudy felt-tipped-printed letters that shouted out one’s name.
At reunions now, making out for me means reading the small type on nametags.
At my all-school reunion, in the dim light of the reunion hall, I tried to visit with one old lady whose tag I couldn’t decipher, only to discover that I was asking my own wife where she was from.
Unfortunately, the band hit a loud refrain about then so I couldn’t hear what she told me what I should do with my nametag.
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