Of Time and the Reunion by Marlene Hickey

“Time here moves so slowly and passes so quickly,” wrote Alice Walker in The Color Purple. I think of those words as I stand looking at the house where I spent most of my formative years and remember how often in those long-ago days I felt the time would never come when I could finally move away from this small town. I must have been placed here as a result of some great cosmic error, I reasoned then, for surely I was destined for greater things. But now more than fifty-five years have swept by since I lived here, and Denis and I have come back to Nebraska for my high school reunion. I gaze sadly at the once beautiful house that is now a rundown rental. I could never have imagined then that I would one day be staying in a motel in the town where I grew up, but everyone I loved is gone from here now.

The downtown is another shock. We walk up Broadway on a Saturday, and I remember how the farmers from all the surrounding towns came on this day to do their weekly shopping, see a movie, and have a meal in a restaurant. The streets bustled with excitement then, with busy people, laughing children, and honking cars. Of course, it wasn’t all laughter all the time. Sometimes by nine o’clock at night, weary women would stand on the sidewalk outside the local saloons waiting for their husbands to have just one more beer, sometimes sending in an older child to beseech Pop to please come out and drive them home.

Now the streets are almost deserted at 2:00 in the afternoon. The remaining shops, those not boarded up, are unfamiliar to me. Where are the old department stores, Montgomery Ward and Penney’s? What has happened to the movie theatres I remember, and the Eagle Café? How could Methodist Hospital have disappeared? Scottsbluff seems to be turning into a ghost town.

As we drive to the motel room we reserved by telephone months in advance, I discover the answer: two large shopping centers have broken out on the outskirts of town, anchored by a WalMart and the Super K. They have seduced most of the shoppers and excitement seekers, and forced the old downtown stores and the Mom and Pop establishments to close their doors forever. Another blow is struck against Smalltown, USA. Why do I sigh over the death of this town? I must remember that I never liked living here in the first place. I have come only to see my classmates. 176 of us graduated together. Of these, thirty-three have died. That’s not too bad a ratio for such a large class after so many years, but it is a tragedy for the thirty-three and for those who loved them.

At the Friday night reunion cookout, I find more surprises. The jocks and cheerleaders of yesterday are now indistinguishable from the rest of us, sporting more than a few extra pounds and a head of gray hair, or no hair, and most of all, a whole new attitude toward their erstwhile classmates. Now they are friendly and chummy, no longer the kings and queens of the world we all moved in during the halcyon days. Time and age are the great levelers. Those of us not in the enchanted circle in days of yore, find ourselves recipients of bear hugs and squeals of delight, as well as genuine interest in what the years have brought us.

I look at old school pictures and compare them with the people I see before me and with the face I see every day in the mirror. Where did we go? Where are those young fresh faces who smile so bravely from the photographs, and with such hope in their eyes? Between conversations, I sit in the warm picnic air and observe my friends from a distance. I think of all the absent ones who will never again attend a high school reunion, and of my best friend, Helen, whose life was snatched from her at the young age of forty-four.

I remember a scene from Jean Cocteau’s play Orpheus: When Orpheus asks Death if she always uses mirrors for her coming and going, Death replies, “Look in a mirror every day of your life, and you will see Death at her work.”

Somewhere I read that in a thinking person’s ideas about life and death, the riddle of time looms large, because it is the door behind which we find eternity. The yardsticks of our lives are clocks, calendars, and histories. Yet these measures have little to do with our real journey, through which we are led by memories of the past, the forgotten sounds and smells and buried emotions. Each time something wonderful happened to me in my life, I told myself that I would stop time and hold on to the precious, joy-filled moments, but they slipped through my fingers like the wind.

My favorite American author, Thomas Wolfe, weaves the theme of time throughout all his great works, his poetry masquerading as prose. He describes Time as a river that is:

. . . Full with the billion dark
and secret moments of our lives
It flows there. Filled with all the hope,
the madness, And the passion of our youth.
It flows by us . . . to the sea.

And he asks:

What is this dream of Time,
This strange and bitter miracle of living?
Is it the wind that drives the leaves
Down bare paths fleeing?
Is it the storm-wild flight of furious days
The storm-swift passing of the million faces,
All lost, forgotten, vanished as a dream?

On the third day we meet for brunch at a campground in the shadow of the purple hills that overlook the valley. The reunion is drawing to a close. We have enjoyed a formal dinner at the Country Club, and we have been treated to guided tours of our old high school and of our area’s only claim to fame, the Scottsbluff National Monument. Before the bus trip, I tell Denis that this particular landmark was named after an explorer named Scott who died at the foot of the bluff, so he is amused when the woman who is his seatmate, herself still a local resident, tells him in all seriousness her version of how the famous hill got its name. “Well,” she says, “there were these two guys. One was named Scott, the other was named Bluff . . .”

Faces glow with nostalgia, and e-mail addresses are exchanged during the lingering good-byes of the last hour. Some of us have more than a thousand miles to drive, while others are just minutes from their homes. We know that these few days of our coming together have been an affirmation of life, and we are parting stronger than when we came, with a new appreciation of what we have been given.
In his poem, Ulysses, Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote:

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are--
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

The class of 1950 would agree. We have survived.