second childhood

Not that I ever left my first childhood--why abandon something that allows you to play, to get dirty, to eat what you want, to take naps, not to have to hold a "real" job, to get an allowance just for making your bed and putting your clothes in the dresser--but this evening I was re-united with two friends from my high school days. We still feel 16 even if we don't look that way, and, when we get together and talk about the "good old days", we mostly remember the good things and what it was like to be a little naive, a lot hopeful, and ready to challenge the world, make it a better place and make some memories in the bargain (whereas most full-blown adults over 60 often spend a lot of time talking about memories instead of making them or expecting to make them in the future). We hadn't been together in about 20 years, but the years melted away as we strained to remember names and faces and where people were in the here and now of 2007. We talked about classmates who were no longer around--most of the Class of '62 now are 62 and it just seemed a little young to have lost a few dozen friends. We talked about teachers and principals and vice-principals (why are vice-principals always the disciplinarians--does it have something to do with their having a title with the word "vice" in it?), coaches and driver-ed teachers (now there's a group that might experience early death after what we put them through driving around town in the dual-brake school vehicle, turning without signalling, backing into trees or other cars, and trying to run over pedestrians in the crosswalk--who'd have thought they had the right-of-way?) and guidance counselors. All in all it was a great evening, a pre-requisite to our class reunion coming up this fall. We graduated from high school 45 years ago, but it didn't seem like such a far-distant milestone as my classmate, Janet Balbutin, and her younger sister, Ava, and I talked through dinner and into the twilight of evening. Some people say you can't go home again and others say it's impossible to recapture your youth, but that's what high school reunions do--they bring you "home" again to those people with whom you shared the growing-up years, the getting-through-teen-age-perils years, the anxiety of who-we-might-be-in-life years and on that one night when we spend time with our classmates, we are 16 again, and the fact that we are in the twilight of our lives, fades into the background as the first song or two from 1962 plays and we look past the receding hairlines, the bi-focals, the wrinkles, and into those youthful faces that we once were...