Transcript for the Piece Audio version of The Reunion
THE REUNION
It was starting to rain as I drove the back way into Worcester, Massachusetts to attend my fortieth sixth grade reunion. This dying mill town was the last place I ever wanted to return to. When I graduated from high school in 1967, I escaped, first moving to New York City and then to Oregon. I worked hard to shed my accent and when people asked me where I was from I would vaguely say that I grew up near Boston. Yet Worcester's gritty neighborhoods of triple-decker houses remained ingrained in my memory. These wood-framed three-story flats clustered around shuttered brick factories, connected by a web of unused railroad tracks. The triple-deckers were painted dreary shades of dark grey, tan, musty green or dirty brown.
A drenching rain poured down as I turned up the street toward my old grade school. Lee Street School looked almost exactly the same as it had 40 years ago, when we sat on the front steps to have our sixth grade class picture taken. I was a few minutes early and I didn't expect anyone else to be there yet, but as I turned into the parking lot I saw a knot of people standing under umbrellas. I wondered why all these middle-aged people had gathered in the parking lot. Then I realized that these were my old classmates.
I spotted Eddie Prunier, who organized this event. Last year he somehow tracked me down to see if I was interested in traveling 3,000 miles for a reunion with my sixth grade classmates. I didn?t remember him and I really wasn't sure that I had the time or cared to travel that far to spend a day with people that I hadn't seen or thought about in 35 years.
A few days later a package arrived from Eddie. It was a color photocopy of our sixth grade class photo with everyone's name written on the back. In the upper left hand corner of the photo, there was Eddie. I remembered that he was one of the shortest boys in the class.
As my eyes searched the photograph, I recognized nearly every face. I was standing in a red smocked dress at one end of the second row. At the other end was one of my best friends, Donna Eteson, in a lavender jumper and white Peter Pan collar. While my expression was a little quizzical, Donna smiled sweetly into the camera, trying to please, as always. Behind her was Jeffrey Cook, the class bully, head cocked, his red shirt slightly askew.
My eyes lingered on the photograph. I could feel the dry autumn leaves crunching under my feet as I climbed the steep hill that began my walk home from school every day. Mainly what I remembered about growing up in Worcester was a claustrophobic desire to leave. I had no sentimentality about my childhood. Yet gazing at this photograph, I started to understand why Eddie wanted to have this reunion. Looking at all these 11 and 12-year-old kids standing on the steps in front of our grade school back in 1961, I wondered what their lives were like now.
A year later I received a funky Xeroxed flyer. You were supposed to check one of two options: Yes, I wouldn't miss this reunion for anything, or No, I'm going to miss out on the most important event of a lifetime.
Why would I want to go to a reunion of my sixth grade class? I never bothered to go to any of my high school or college reunions, not even my 30th college reunion that was happening that same day in New York City. Yet, I got a plane ticket and a hotel reservation. As the day of the Lee Street School reunion drew near I found myself thinking, why am I doing this? Would I have anything to share with these people? Most of them still lived only a few miles from the grade school? Probably I was the only one who had become a hippie, a political activist, a lesbian feminist. Would they all just think I was weird? But actually what I was really afraid of, was that I would feel like I was too cool to be there.
Standing in the rain, still perky and short, Eddie was sharing a huge black umbrella with Donna Eteson, my best friend in fourth grade. Donna?s hair was almost white, but she looked just like I remembered her. She ran up to me exclaiming: "Where are your braids? I remember you with braids!" I reminded her that I cut them off in fifth grade. We gazed into each other?s older but eerily familiar faces, as if we were staring into a mirror, and time started speeding backwards as the rain splashed all around us. Eddie ushered us inside the old school building. In our day, 300 students attended Lee Street School. Kindergarten through sixth grade. Now it is a Head Start center, but hardly anything has changed. The same oak paneled vestibule and heavy fire doors. The echoing wainscoted corridor where we huddled against the walls with our heads tucked between our legs during air raid drills. The wooden walls and floors reverberate with the voices of twenty-five middle-aged people gasping in astonishment at the familiarity of everything. "Is it Barbara, Barbara Bernstein? Look at that."
'You're who?"
"Carol Buckley." "Oh, hi Carol."
Our twelve-year old eyes peak recognizably through middle-aged faces. Phil Torgeson, the minister's son, comes up to me and we fall into conversation, as if we had just seen each other last week. "I couldn't believe it when I got the note from Eddie. I thought what a great idea, but I didn't think that Eddie could pull it off. I figured everybody is going to be in different parts of the world and maybe 3 people would show up. Look, almost everyone?s here. It's fantastic." Across the hall I spot Jeffrey Cook. I didn't like him when we were kids. He was always getting into trouble and he liked to pick on the smart kids in class, especially me. I'm amazed that he's here. I figured he might be in jail, or too strung out to find his way back to Lee Street School. He seems really happy to see me and I find myself grinning at a surprising kindred spirit.
"How's life been treating you? Good?"
"It's been really good, yeah."
"Are you living in Worcester?"
"No, I live in Portland, Oregon."
"Oh, do you really? Oh, it's nice out there. I've been out there before. I've been doing some work on the West Coast. I've been an actor and singer for years."
"Oh, really?"
"I just did a movie last year. Yeah. I'm going to be doing another one, another television show. So what do you do out in Oregon?"
"I'm a radio producer and a musician."
"Are you? That's right, you used to play violin."
"Yeah."
"Ah ha, how's my memory!?"
"Pretty good."
"Not bad for forty goddamn years. That's right, I remember you then."
Eddie tries to herd us onto the front steps of the school so we can recreate our sixth grade class photo, everyone standing in the same spot we occupied 40 years ago.
"Barbara, stand here."
"Do you want a profile or a full frontal?"
"Put a number on him."
"We gotta squeeze."
"We're all a little bigger now than we were forty years ago."
"Forty years . . ."
"I wanted to do this more than go to my high school reunion."
That's Janie Yerow who is standing right behind me. She was the only other Jewish kid in our class. When we were in junior high school we both fell in love with West Side Story and would walk through the corridors singing "When You're A Jet."
"What are we in a lineup here? I didn't do it."
" didn't do it!"
"I did."
"Cook did it."
After the photograph, Eddie tries to take us on a tour of the school. "Everyone remembers kindergarten. This is the kindergarten class. Everybody remember that. Okay."
"Miss Amidon."
"Miss Amidon. That's right."
I'm walking beside Jeffrey Cook. His face betrays the self-destructive course of his life, but his eyes are backlit with an artistic sensitivity I remember, that only came out when he sang, the only time he wasn't getting into trouble. I can also see in his eyes that he's taken at least as many psychedelic drugs as I have.
"Well, I still remember where I spent most of my time, the principal's office. Jeffrey Cook, go to the principal?s office NOW!"
We mill around in our old sixth grade classroom. You can still see the holes in the floor where the cast iron legs of the lift-top oak desks were screwed down. I stand with Donna by the old wardrobe sharing memories.
"I remember you. You wrote your own newspaper. I probably still have one put in a box some place."
Eddie wants to round us all up and go out for lunch but nobody else seems ready to leave yet. So I suggest that we go around the room and all say some-thing about what our lives have been like for the last 40 years. Eddie starts off.
"My name is Eddie Prunier and I?m a physician. I work in New York City and I live on Long Island. I have a daughter who?s nine years old and a son who?s fourteen."
"I'm Donna Eteson. I?ve come in from Los Angeles. I was a pioneer and went into dentistry and I had an office in Los Angeles for while, teach in a number of dental schools and kind of retired now to take care of my young children. I have three young daughters."
Donna and I were the two highest achieving girls in the class. We were also very competitive and fought a lot. In fifth grade a new girl Kris Irvine joined our class and I soon dropped Donna and became best friends with Kris.
"I'm Kris Irvine and I've been in banking for 30 years. I've only had to apply for a job once and I worked for the largest bank to ever fail in this country, the Bank of New England."
In junior high Kris and I were in different classes and we drifted apart. But Janie Yerow and I hung out together until high school and she was always trying to teach me how to be cool.
"My name is Jane Yerow Thoms. I live in Boston, in Medford, MA and my husband and I, it?s my second husband and I have just come back yesterday from a seven month road trip where we have quit our jobs, got a big pickup truck and a slide-on camper and saw the USA. Did all the national parks and followed music all the way from Tennessee and Louisiana all the way out to California. Now I?m gonna try and jump back into the job market. I'm not really sure what I want to do."
The bad boys are still sitting in the back of the class: Zach and Jeff and Jack.
"My name is Zach Alexanian. When I left Lee Street I went to Forest Grove and from there to Boys Trade School and from there my draft number was very high so I joined the Navy for four years active duty to avoid getting drafted into the army during Vietnam. Have two daughters, one 33, one 35, and two grand kids and have been married unh times so it's a - three - forget about it. Try as many times as you want but if you don't have it you don't have it, it just don't work."
"I'm Jeff Cook. I was a little tough to handle as a kid, I guess, so they sent me to five secondary schools. I had a little bit of a checkered past. I've been all over the world, I've been a commercial fisherman, I've been in the Merchant Marine for years. I am truly flooded with memories looking up at the ceiling. It's just wonderful to be here with you and still sucking air and taking solids and it's really wonderful for me because I doubt I'll get a second forty."
"They're doing wonderful things with drugs these days, Jeff. We can all live longer."
"Oh, I never tried them."
"That's why I wanted to point it out to you."
"I'm Jack Howarth, when I left these hallowed halls I tried Assumption Prep with Eddie and me and the good fathers didn't get along quite well. They asked me to leave after my junior year so I graduated, I was the first graduating class from Doherty Memorial. When I left Doherty I went to the University of Da Nang, which was a garden spot of East Asia. And I?m now in my 35th year with the Post Office. I'm Post Master of Yarmouth down on the Cape. My wife and I, in two weeks we'll be celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary. A rarity these days and I have three great kids. I thought when Eddie first called me on this, I said, you've got to be kidding me. It's absolutely incredible the amount of work you people put into this to get a hold of everybody. Those of us that are still alive that is."
One of our deceased classmates was Tommy Shamgosian, who was always getting into trouble with Jeff and Zachary.
"Tommy and I went down to the railroad tracks. We were on a stonewall this high and we put the two or three caps on the ground. Kids outside, teachers it was recess, the place was full of people. Tommy and I climbed up on the stone wall and both of us lifted this rock that we were going to drop on this bomb. And we dropped it and it hit and shrapnel went from here to everywhere, it was everywhere, the sky was full of rocks and when the dust cleared, the two big steel doors that you pushed . . .came off just like this, voomph, bang. We must have sheared the hinges. And then later on in the classroom, the principal says, will the two boys, he came over the loud speaker and Tommy and I were sitting right there and says, "will the two boys who blew the doors off the school please come down to the office." "Did you go down, Zach?" "NO!"
"My name is Roger Guernsey. I've gone through two marriages, gave up drugs thirty years ago after incarceration, gave up alcohol twenty-five years ago after running a car off the road, grateful member of a twelve step fellowship."
I can see the tentative second grader inside the bald smiling man who is talking. I remember Roger sitting at his desk beside the wide bank of windows, trying to figure out how to please the teacher and make the other kids like him.
"So I'm going to do one of three things, I'm either going to be ordained as a minister, or start a plowing and landscaping business or just bag it all and buy an RV and go across the country. It's probably going to be door number three.?
Standing next to me now is Billy Sanders, who was the smartest boy in the class. In fourth grade we sat next to each other and we often got teased about being boyfriend and girlfriend. Actually both of us were way too shy to be interested in each other.
"My name is Bill Sanders. I went to Phillips Exeter Academy and I went on to Princeton University and majored in the sixties and minored in philosophy. But coming out of that it was a little chaotic times for me. Didn't find much of a career focus for quite for awhile. Eventually wound up working in health care services, decided I need more education and went back to college, learning to be a physician assistant which I now am, living in the Adirondack Park up in New York and delivering rural medicine family practice for the last ten years or so. That's where I am. Never got married, stayed single."
"How about Barbara Bernstein."
"Walking encyclopedia." Donna Eteson would tease me when we were kids by calling me a walking encyclopedia. For a moment I bristle with memories of being taunted because I was smart. And then I realize that here recording this event I'm somehow playing out the role I had as a kid in this class.
"I went to school in New York at Barnard and I was like Billy. I majored in LSD and SDS and minored in creative writing and in ?68 was part of the Columbia revolution and was in the President's office and that was the first time I was arrested. Unlike Jeff most of my arrests were political though I did get busted for shop lifting in Oregon in 1970."
But the most important piece of my life is the hardest one to share and I feel the most nervous as I say: "and I met my partner many years ago, but we've been together 18 years, my partner Elaine, and we have two cats and a dog."
Jeff singing "Over The Rainbow."
Jeffrey Cook stands in the front of the classroom and dedicates a song to the two classmates who have died. One of their mothers is standing at the side of the room, holding back tears.
We go out for lunch at a little cafe owned by one of our classmates. It's across town in an old strip mall, which has barely changed since we were sixth graders. Even the prices on the menu could have been from 1961. I sit with Roger Guernsey and Jane Yerow. They both want to talk to me about my being a lesbian. Roger tells me about all his lesbian friends and Jane asks me if I ever thought that she was gay. I tell her that when I looked at old photos of her that notion crossed my mind, but that I also remember that she was always more into boys than I ever was. I tell her how in junior high school when we all flipped out over West Side Story and she and everyone else had crushes on George Chakiris, I had a crush on Natalie Wood. Of course I never told anyone.
Four hours into the reunion people are still hanging out together talking. I can't believe that we're actually so interested in each other that it's this hard to leave. I tear myself away after promising to make CD copies of the recording I made and mail them to everybody. Donna, who always loved to collect the milk money, collects a few dollars from everyone to cover my costs.
A month later I got an email from Jane Yerow:
It was really fun to see everyone. Our next trip should include Oregon, Washington and some of the more Northerly states, so we'll definitely look you up then, if not sooner. Thanks for the CD. I'll be in touch.
p.s. I loved your George Chakiris/Natalie Wood story!
