My Magical Mystery Nostalgia Tour has come to an end. It’s time to return to the present time. Which isn’t that great. But it’s all we got.
Pam accuses me of being a serial nostalgic. She’s right. The longer-ago memories are, the more enjoyable they are to retrieve.
One definition of nostalgia: “A wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one’s life, to one’s home or homeland, or to one’s family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time.” Heck yeah, I’m nostalgic!
The approach of my Fiftieth Class Reunion took me back to 1974. Maybe 1974 wasn’t a lot better than 2024, but I had dark hair then.
I realized that April would be the Fiftieth Anniversary of My Homerun. I had fun with that. No bigger deal was ever made of a lesser athletic moment. Things improve with the passing of time. It’s now a 450-foot behemoth shot when I tell the story. It’ll be five hundred feet by the time I’m seventy.
A somber memory followed. I used this space to write about my brother Dean’s death the week before I graduated. Thanks to you readers for letting me use words as therapy. Grieving of that type is never over. We just move to different phases. There is the irresistible urge to imagine what Dean’s life would have been in these fifty years.
A few weeks ago, we had our actual class reunion. St. Mary’s, class of 1974, there were seventy-four of us. That was the same number who graduated from Sleepy Eye Public that year. One need only look at the smaller school sizes now to see small town demographics writ large.
Being in my hometown, I see many classmates regularly. If you see someone all the time, they never get old. If you haven’t seen someone in twenty years, it’s funny how old they got.
Our reunion was in the afternoon, which is a good thing. We all go to bed early since Johnny Carson went off the air. A winter ago, the idea of being in Sleepy Eye’s Summerfest parade was hatched at a bar in Havasu, Arizona. Enough of us thought that was a good idea to fill Lowell Heiderscheidt’s trailer.
I wanted to have a sign made that said, “Hey kids, this is what you’re going to look like in fifty years.” We decided that would be too frightening for children.
At the end of August I had another reunion, this one only the 47th anniversary. In 1977, I spent the fall semester in Germany with students from St. John’s University and the College of St. Benedict. There were ten Johnnies and seventeen Bennies under the guidance of the Sisters Margetta Nathe and Incarnata Gergen.
I can’t remember how it was that I signed up for that. In hindsight, I see it was an important part of my growing up. I had never been in a place where I didn’t know anybody. I could take chances on the person I wanted to be. All of us were nineteen or twenty. Childhood and adolescence were behind us; we were all trying out adulthood.
Our group grew close, bound together a continent away. We studied on weekdays in Konigstein, a cozy suburb of Frankfurt. On weekends, we traveled to all those countries that are amazingly close by from the center of Europe. At first, we traveled together by bus to places Sr. Margretta knew from her many times being there.
Later, we used Eurail passes to go off on adventures in small groups. It was a heady experience for a Brown County farm kid who had barely been out of Minnesota. I went from stumbling around Mankato that summer to circumventing Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin.
It was a set of experiences that came rapidly and intensely with those Bennies and Johnnies. It’s a torrent of memories when I think back on it now.
I’m not sure why, but I didn’t stay in touch with my fellow travelers when we got back to the States. I returned to the friends I had from the year before. It was as if the German experience was “a galaxy far, far away,” to quote from Star Wars which came out in 1977.
A year ago, four of us reconnected and began planning a reunion. With the help of the alumni departments at St. Ben’s and St. John’s, and some detective work, we were able to locate most of the group. On a Sunday afternoon in August, sixteen of us got together at the Bavarian Gasthaus, a German restaurant east of St. Paul.
I hadn’t seen most of those folks in a long time; name tags were helpful. As we chattered and laughed together, trying to see how our memories fit together, familiarity crept back. Can one pick up conversations that began forty-seven years ago? Yes, and it was great fun.
We went around and had everybody tell what they’d been doing since college. Basically, tell your life story in five minutes. Despite that huge reduction, it was fascinating the many and varied paths we’d taken. Triumphs, sorrows, joy, loss came through in that condensed form.
At both reunions, we took time to remember those who’d “gone before.” Nine of my classmates and three of our German group have passed away. On the internet, I found the obituary of a Johnnie friend. I gasped a little when I saw he died the day our son was born. That seemed like something coming full circle, but I’m not sure what.
In both groups, we are becoming eligible for senior discounts, all of us are around “retirement age.” There are people still working, cutting back, part-time, retired, or just tired, as they say. Everyone is scoping out this next phase of our lives, putting some things in and taking some things out. Health gets attention, since after these many times around the sun, we know having our health is a great blessing.
Reunions allow us to be with people who were part of our lives once. Some of them may have been challenging. Some of them were beautiful glows of light on our path. All are gifts from God who teach us something. We are who we are because of them.