If we are all time travelers, pushing steadily into the future at the rate the red needle drags around the face of a clock, then our high school class reunions are way points along the trip -- the rest stops where it's possible to measure how far we've traveled.
Michael Marrocco has traveled three decades since his graduation portrait appeared in The Cranstonian, the yearbook of Cranston High School East. The shoulder-length, wavy mop of hair he wore in high school has been pruned since 1975, though Marrocco has maintained the football player's build, the off-center smile in the photo, and the hearty back-slappin' sociability that serves well in a career "in sales." With his high school picture pinned to his suit jacket, Marrocco joined a hundred other Cranston East Thunderbolts on Thanksgiving weekend for their class reunion, a quin-annual ritual for classmates, the one time every five years when their travels through time intersect.
At the 30th-reunion banquet at The Village Inn, in Narragansett, where the tables were set in school colors, green and white, the crowd lingered around the bar the way people congregate in the kitchen at a house party. Classmates wore pins with their high school snapshots from the '70s, taken from a yearbook that is practically an encyclopedia of funny haircuts. Chatter and shrieks of laughter competed with the pounding bomp, bomp, bomp bassline of Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger." A man and woman sitting together, both recently divorced, chatted merrily and pretended they didn't notice their knees were touching.
"You think of where you saw people the last time," Marrocco said. "You think and you hope it's not that different now than last time."
OOf course it was different. They were all around 48 years old. Marrocco had not seen some of the graduates since Gerald Ford fell down the stairs of Air Force One. "I look in the mirror, I don't think I'm any different, I don't think I'm any older than I was," he said. But the evidence of time travel was all around him, in the faces and the lives of the men and women he remembered as teenagers. If age was happening to them, Marrocco admitted, it was happening to him.
At a distance of 30 years, high school is remembered in scenes, like a highlights reel, mixed with the vague images of sitting in class, practicing the clarinet and walking the halls through the racket of slamming lockers. The wackiest highlights, and those starring our favorite people, are more vivid.
Stephanie Silvia, who left Cranston for Singapore, and then Singapore for Texas, noted happily that the girls who were pretty in high school were still pretty at the reunion. "Sometimes," she said, "you have to look at their eyes to remember who they are."
Time seems to leave the eyes alone. Grief and stress, taxes and unemployment -- none of it touches the eyes. Some eyes can even send a time traveler backwards.
At the first sight of Ed Paliotta, Monica Macera Anderson squealed: "My first boyfriend!'
The mother of two from Warwick embraced Paliotta, who had come from Las Vegas with his twin brother, John. "My first boyfriend! Look at you! Oh my god!"
"I love these kids," Anderson said. Classmates are, to her, still kids.
Peeking back in time stirred feelings that a simpler life was somehow better. Back in the day, everyone seemed to say, kids hopped on their single-speed bikes with the banana seats and went someplace, not like today's high-def digital Web generation, which can't live without an iPod in one ear and a cell phone on the other.
Silvia couldn't imagine growing up among 21st-century distractions. "I look at my kids today," she said. "It was just easier back then. You got up, you went to school, you had your activities."
Said Robert Bartolomeo: "We never waited for anyone to drive us anywhere. Kids today, if you don't drive them they wouldn't do anything."
Without intending to sound like everybody's grandfather, Linda Burke added: "We walked to school in the rain and we didn't have raincoats."
No era is perfect, of course. As the Class of '75 left high school, Congress grimly debated what to do about the coming invasion of the killer bees. Locally, a men's suit was advertised as: "A handsome plaid of polyester with a bit of nylon so it looks just as crisp at the end of the day."
Bartolomeo wore such a suit for his high school picture. He's a manufacturing manager now, and a father, married for 25 years. He came to the reunion with his cousin, and former classmate, Cyndy Mikaelian Klenk. She's a mother, a dance instructor, and a makeup artist and hair stylist for television.
"The best date I've had in a year - my cousin. How sad is that?" Klenk said, with a laugh. The conversation veered between family and divorce. "You know what, I wouldn't change a thing," she said. "I never thought the highlight of my day would be dropping my son off to school and picking him up."
At a reunion, everyone asks everybody: Whatcha been doin'?
Burke, formerly Linda Cicione, answered each time, "I've been sick. I have breast cancer." She sounded matter-of-fact. She shrugged, "I'm used to it. All I do is go for treatment, the past 18 months." Cancer could not keep her from her 30-year reunion. "Coming here could be my last one. I might not be here five years from now."
The two divorcees slow-danced at their table.
Stephen Boyle, an account executive from Warwick, looked at his name tag and his former, skinnier face. "I'm going on the South Beach Diet," he swore. "This is going on the refrigerator, starting Monday."
A woman rolled her eyes at a trio of very tall, very slender women. "We have the cheerleaders over here," she whispered sarcastically, grinning at her own cattiness. By 8 p.m., the DJ had switched to dinner music and the banquet staff herded people to their tables. Marrocco took the microphone to emcee the class awards.
The Most Kids Award? The winner had five. Most grand kids? Ten. The Aging Gracefully Award was open to any female classmate wearing an article of her daughter's clothing.
The Youngest Child Award? Joyce Beauchesne, of Warwick, had an 18-month-old. "Can anybody beat that?" Marrocco asked.
"Who would want to beat that?" someone answered.
How about a prize, Marrocco offered, "for any classmate who can produce a pill of Viagra."
Long silence.
"Oh, we get all polite all of a sudden."
People cheered through a slide show of high school pictures.
Beauchesne, with the newly adopted baby at home, had not been to a reunion for 25 years. She had come to her 30th because, "I feel blessed," she said. "I love being 48. It's the best time of my life. It's a time that you feel so brave. Everything now is possible."
Yet it's still not possible for Marrocco to beat Judy Luber Rzucidlo, voted most athletic girl back in '75, at arm wrestling. Their arms quivered against each other for a full minute in their once-every-five-years rematch.
"You ain't moving it, sister," Marrocco told her. But he couldn't pin her, either.
Roy Powrie giggled through the play-by-play. "Nothing but pride holding his arm up right now."
They ended in a draw. Marrocco seemed satisfied. "I'll see you in five years," he promised her, then bragged, "I'm the only guy in the class who will go against her."
Rzucidlo lives on a farm in Connecticut. The wrestling match was no joke: her biceps are thick, as hard as freshly cut maple. "I have a simple life which I'm happy about," she said. "I didn't go up the corporate ladder." She looks forward to class reunions "to check in, see where people are at, just to see how time passes by fast."
Cheryl Rawe, of Nashua N.H. -- that's pronounced raw, she said, "like a raw hamburger" -- cried a little during the slide show. "When you see these people again, you always have a connection. I feel drawn to them. It's a weird feeling."
Classmates are the people most like us, who share our oldest memories from the times that shaped us. What happens to them might easily happen to us. Maybe that's why those at the reunion flipped quickly past the page in the souvenir booklet labeled IN MEMORIAM, which listed 19 names from the Class of '75.
"I opened this book, what freaked me out is the people who have died," Rawe said. "Now you better enjoy life. This is real. The thing I noticed as I sit here tonight, it's starting to sink in that I'm getting older. Look at me," grabbing the pin with her high school picture, "I don't even look like me. Nobody looks like themselves." After a moment, she summed up the lesson: "It's a reality check." What she had always heard is true: a lifetime is not an eternity.
Last call at the bar. People went for their coats. Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" played over the P.A. Deb DeCesaris listened to an old friend describe a date they had in school, which she does not remember. "He's very handsome today," she joked later. "I wish I remembered." DeCesaris was ready to declare the Class of 1975 a success. "We have kids, they're in college, they're getting on with their own lives. We did OK."
The divorcees shared a lingering kiss at the bar, maybe a sign of a major change of course in their travels through time.
Your turn: How did your last class reunion go?
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