“I’ll go with you!” I enthused when Mom showed me her invitation to her 64^th high school reunion, for the Class of ’58. I have never once attended my high school, college, or law school reunions, but felt excited about going to Mom’s.  But the morning of, she confessed to being very nervous and perhaps not wanting to go.  I suggested we just go for an afternoon drive and perhaps stop in at the reunion to see what it was like.  We drove through the old dilapidated Magna neighborhood, Mom pointing out “Uncle John’s” house here and “Uncle Jim’s” house there.  With Mom hanging on my arm, we entered the high school cafeteria and saw milling around a milieu of gray smiling heads and gnarled mottled hands with an assortment of canes and walkers.  Faces mostly were unrecognizable to Mom after 64 years, but looking at each other’s nametags through the bottoms of their trifolds, recognition dawned and faces lit up.  “Lucille!” one woman cried.  “Valorna!” Mom called back.  They were young girls again.  Louie Notarianni wandered over with a pleasant hello.  “He was so cool then,” Mom whispered to me.  “Now look at him!”  I guess carrying the cool is harder at 85.  “Neil wasn’t very nice,” she remembered, but noted how pleasant he was to everyone now.  And her second cousin Gay (with the same maiden name, Bawden) ambled over with a smile and a hug.  “When I called in and found out you were coming,” Gay rattled to Mom, “I decided the long drive from Portland would be worth it.”  Still sweet friends.  Don Lund welcomed the crowd and explained how Doreen Harmon had catered the lunch from Harmon’s grocery store as a gift to her class.  Don held up like a waving flag a typed list of 147 Gone But Not Forgotten classmates, 147 out of a class of 200.  The list sobered me, knowing Mom was one of a dwindling minority of surviving members of the Class of ’58.  Which one of these good cheerful persons will be next to join this list? I wondered.  I hoped it would not be Mom, turning 83 this year.  The scull & crossbones on the reunion announcement added a macabre touch to the event, even knowing the Pirate was the mascot of Cyprus High.  Mom decided she had had enough of a good thing, and that we could “go home now.”  I hurried over to cousin Gay, a spritely youthful woman, embraced her (for the last time in this life), and crowed, “The Bawdens are great!” twinkling to her husband that the Iversons were okay, too.

Class of 1958 Cyprus HS Centennial banner, reused from 4 years prior.

Class of ’58 reunion announcement.