The dream comes back often enough that I have stopped being surprised by it. I am walking the halls of my high school, the version that exists only in my head, and I end up in the fine arts center almost every time. Usually it is the band room. Sometimes it is the theater above it. I spent a lot of time there throughout high school, especially senior year, and those rooms were where I began learning who I was going to become before I had any real proof of it.
Sometimes I land in the lunchroom instead, and I always know why. That is where Mike Church told me the Challenger had exploded, and I did not believe him, right up until I did. Some part of my mind decided that moment belonged in the same building as everything else it was not ready to let go of.
I do not wake up from these dreams shaken or sentimental. I wake up and make coffee. But forty years later, it says something that my subconscious still knows the floor plan by heart, even though I could not tell you where any of my lockers were or what a single classroom looked like. Memory makes its own choices about what it keeps and what it allows to disappear. I wish there were a confirmation screen before something vanished, the way there is when you delete a file from your computer. Are you sure? One last chance to keep it.
I have been thinking about all of this more than usual lately, because the dream and the actual building finally had a reason to overlap. This past weekend was my 40th high school class reunion, and even typing that number, I still have to stop and do the math twice before it sounds real.
I have gone back for two reunions, the 10th and the 20th, and if I am being honest, I did not enjoy either one very much. I was never one of the athletes or the popular kids, genetics left me an NBA center trapped in a guard’s body, so there was only so much a name tag and a cash bar could do to manufacture a connection that was not really there the first time around. Do not get me wrong. I had friends, and I liked most of my classmates.
What I never really had was contact. Once my parents moved away, I drifted from most of them, mostly because I rarely went back, and long-distance phone calls were expensive. I suppose I could have written letters. I just did not form the kind of lasting friendships with them that I later formed in college and beyond.
The 10th landed just a few weeks after my father died. Some classmates knew and asked how I was holding up. Others did not know and asked how my parents were doing. Neither question was one I wanted to answer that weekend.
The 20th came a little more than a year after my mother died, and I brought my wife along that time. She did not know a single person in the room, and I do not think she had much fun. It is a strange thing, bringing someone you love into a part of your life she was never part of. She could see the building and hear the names, but she could not see what any of it meant. There was no way for me to hand that over to her in the space of one evening.
Going back for a reunion has always been a little different for me because my parents moved away four years after I graduated. There has never been a house to stay in, a childhood bedroom still holding my trophies, or family to visit while I was in town. You stay in a hotel. The reunion becomes the entire reason for the trip, not one stop on a longer visit home.
When my parents died and were buried in that same town, the tether became stranger. I go back now for a cemetery, not a childhood. Visiting their graves is usually one of the first things I do and one of the last, though I have never made the trip specifically for that reason. The cemetery is something I stop at on my way to something else, a reunion, a funeral, or a drive through town on my way somewhere farther. It is a ritual built around memory, the same names on the same stone and the same silence waiting for me.
None of that means I have lost interest in the people. I do not think I would go back to relive what happened forty years ago. Those years mattered, but I have never felt much need to step inside them again and pretend nothing has changed. If I went back, it would be to find out what happened after we all walked out of that building and into the rest of our lives.
The truth is that social media, Facebook in particular, has already filled in much of that story. Most of us got married. Some of us got divorced. Many had children. We built careers, changed directions, found success, and endured failure. Some became exactly who they imagined they would become when we were seventeen. Many of us did not. That may sound colder than I intend because it is not that I do not care about them. I do. It is simply that high school was forty years ago, and I am still trying to look forward. I remain curious about where life took everyone. I am just not sure I am curious enough to drive three hundred fifty miles for the chance that they might show up.
Even so, I was on the fence about going. My wife could not make the trip because a co-worker’s bachelorette outing had already claimed part of her weekend. If I went, I would be going alone, though maybe that was fine since she had never known any of these people to begin with. One classmate, whose wife was not coming either, offered to make me his plus-one for the drive. I appreciated it, but the offer did not move me any closer to going. It still meant a long drive there, a hotel room, and a long drive back.
I had not decided anything when my phone rang. It was my youngest son, the one who spent his high school years on the tennis court, calling from Nebraska, where he lives now. He asked if I had anything going on that particular weekend. I told him about the reunion, still undecided and still turning it over. He said he had a better idea. He wanted me to come play golf with him at a course called Landmand.
I did not need to think about it. The invitation checked boxes I had not realized I was counting. Time with my son, first and simplest. A round of golf with him, which does not happen nearly as often as I would like now that he lives in Nebraska. And a chance to play a course where people wait a year for a tee time and still come away empty-handed. It was not a difficult choice. It was barely a choice at all.
Landmand sits in the middle of nowhere by design, carved into steep, windblown bluffs outside Homer, Nebraska, on a stretch of ground so rough that architects told the farmer who built it to look elsewhere. He did not. Now it is one of the hardest tee times to get in the country, an entire season’s reservations disappearing in less than an hour whenever they open the book. My son had one, and on a Sunday morning in September, that mattered more to me than anything happening three hundred fifty miles away.
The day started cool and gray, with rain moving through in waves. At one point, we watched lightning far enough away that we decided to keep playing rather than duck for cover. Later in the round, the clouds broke enough to let the sun through, though they never fully cleared. We played the rest of the morning under that half-lit sky, with the sun and clouds trading turns overhead.
My son’s roommate came along, and his father did too. It was not one father and son on that course but two, trading shots and ribbing each other across fairways wide enough to lose a golf cart in. There was no ritual waiting for me at Landmand and no history I was expected to revisit. There was just a course my son knew and I had never played, a son who wanted me there, and a Sunday that had not yet decided whether it would rain or clear.
I played terribly at the start and improved only slightly as the round went on. It did not matter. A day on the golf course with my son is priceless.
When I got home after golf, the reunion photographs began showing up. Some appeared on Facebook, posted by classmates who had gone. A few more were sent directly to me by someone who thought of me while scrolling through a camera roll. I went through them slowly, forty years compressed onto a phone screen.
Most of the faces I recognized without much effort, aged but unmistakably themselves. A handful I could not place at all, people who had apparently once shared hallways and classes with me but had left no trace in my memory.
Then I reached a photograph taken in the band room, where I had spent so much of my high school life. Standing in the middle of the group was Mr. Winter, my high school band director, smiling.
A month earlier, I had written about what he meant to me. I had ended that piece by saying that if I knew Mr. Winter would be at the reunion, I would seriously consider making the three hundred fifty mile drive to see him. He was there. I just had not known he would be.
Of everyone I might have wanted to see that weekend, he was the one I wanted to see most. I stopped scrolling and took in the photograph. I wondered if anyone had sent him what I had written about him. What I felt was not regret exactly. It was the honest weight of what a choice costs, even when it is the right one.
Sireadh Toileachas 