Pre-Union Revisited
My friend Terry from college is a syndicated columnist. She has written a column about our reunion weekend, which you can read in its entirety by going to www.terrymarotta.com (see Recent Columns).
Terry has also sent us her own pictures of the weekend, which I have scanned. When I take pictures, my eyes always wander off into the scenery (in case you haven't noticed). Terry focuses on people, so it's a good thing she was taking pictures, too. Here's the whole group:
She says, "Now while my workweek activities haven’t much changed since I was five and spent the quiet hours filling pages with happy scribbles, theirs certainly have: three of them are lawyers and two have PhDs; one is a development adviser for affordable housing initiatives and one is a partner in a hedge fund."
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Susan (at right) is one of our attorneys.
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It's true. I remember Terry's happy scribbles. I was so impressed in college when I first found out that she had kept a daily diary all her life and had every single volume, each filled with her careful and distinctive hand. How wonderful. I have kept a journal ever since, but not daily, and not always.
And it was from Terry that I learned what to DO with a journal: write down things you see and hear:
"Think of everything that happens to you as a brightly colored bit of thread which you will set aside and use some day, like women in the old days used to do with scraps of cloth. What did they make them into? Quilts of course, made up of pieces of their children's clothes, their own wedding dresses, bright scraps of this or that."
One of her examples: "I saw two tiny boys feeding bits of their fast-food lunch to some ducks. Said one to the other, 'Doze eagles! They eat some fwies!' (The 'eagles' looked at him as if to say, 'yeah and we can eat you too if we feel like it.')"
The way her column started, Terry says, was that about 20 years ago she showed a few pages to the editor of the local newspaper. He said, "Can you do that every week?"
"Can you eat your dinner every night?" she replied.
(She might not actually have said that. She thought it.)
Anyway, writing about our weekend, Terry says, "I didn’t think for a moment that we might be comparing ourselves in any kind of cold or evaluating way, but I did worry a little that, with my black curly hair so changed now, they might not know me when I came to meet them at the airport.
"Silly me. An hour into our visit, I realized these seven would know me bald in a spacesuit playing the zither. And so would I know each one of them. Just by her walk. Just by the sound of her voice."
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We would know Cathy anywhere.
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Same here. I sat in the South Bus Terminal in Boston waiting for Judy, wondering if I would know her or miss her. But I knew her instantly. Of course.
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We would know Judy anywhere.
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Terry, observes, "The part of it that touched me most was how well we remembered one another’s stories.
"One remembered me telling her how my family members were always sighing, 'Oh dear, bread and beer, if I were dead I wouldn’t be here.' I remembered her telling me there were two kinds of people in the world, the Executives and the Sweetie-pies and all you had to do was figure out which one you were. She has no memory of ever saying this, which is pretty funny since I’ve been dividing people into these two camps ever since."
Vicki hasn't changed much either. R: it appears she has donned a lampshade.
Terry concludes: "On our last afternoon together, the seven began collaborating on the Sunday crossword puzzle, but instead of joining in, I slipped off to my bedroom."
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Lynne wants a clue.
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"Maybe I wanted to hear them from a distance; to pretend we were back in the dorm maybe, and it was nearly suppertime, and from my 'single' at the top of the front stairs, I could just hear their merry voices.
"Maybe I wanted to store that sound forever in my memory."
