Tuesday, June 30, 2015

The Unreunion


This week I went to see the Pixar movie Inside Out.  I didn't think it was Pixar's finest when I left the movie, but I have found myself thinking about the themes several times over the week. Instead of a classic good vs evil plot, the movie has a joy vs sadness plot. Each of the main character's memories are represented by a marble and are colored according to what kind of memory she has; purple for fear, green for disgust, red for anger, blue for sadness and golden for joy. Joy, the emotion, has to rescue the golden core memories from being touched by Sadness, which changes the colors of the marbles. I know that sounds confusing but stick with me. What the moviegoer finds out in the end, of course, is that joy and sadness are not exclusive, and the core memory marbles

Over the past thirty years, I have looked back on the "high school years" as fraught wit.....(cue needle scratching across a record.)

Wait right there, I'm stuck! I wanted so much to be able to express what the 30th year Unreunion of the Battery Creek High School Class of 1985, with special guests form 1984 was like, but I can't. A reunion is a collective experience not necessarily meant to be shared with everyone else. What we experienced together is unique to any other group.

We are a group of kids that understand the implications of being raised by a Vietnam Veteran.

We are a group of kids that love the sound of screaming F-4's over the marsh.

We are a group of kids that inhale deeply when we are around pluff mud, and the same group who discovered in 9th grade that the smell was caused by rot.(Thanks Mrs. Eberhardt) But we still long for the smell. (Love it is a stretch.)

We are a group of kids that remember dancing around the school yard before the bell rang to keep the sand fleas from landing in our ears.

We are a predominately white group of kids that went to a predominately black school, which I think enriched our character in different ways.

We are a group of kids that marched with the band in yellow shirts and blue dickies pants with the fingers cut out of many pairs of white gloves.

We are a group of kids that understand the changes that have taken place on Hunting Island. It is very difficult to explain to someone who didn't know that beach before how much of it has washed away.

We are a group of kids who grew up in a Beaufort that offered a 4 screen movie theater and the Hardee's parking lot for entertainment. And the drive-in.

We are a group of kids who remember when Frogmore was Frogmore, Land's End was not marked by a brown park sign, and Fort Fremont was not for the faint of heart.

We are a group of kids that understand 125% humidity.

And now we are a group of kids who have grown into interesting, mature and beautiful adults raising a generation of interesting and beautiful children who we hope have the privilege of friendships that transcend time and location such as ours as they make collective memories of their own.