Reunion 2: SME Tour

Posted: June 18th, 2009 | Author: miconian | Filed under: Miconian At Large | Tags: high school, reunion, SME | Comments

The morning of the second day of the reunion, there was a tour of the high school scheduled for 1o am. I didn’t plan on going. I figured I’d be hung over, and that my days of having to get up early for high school were long over.

But in the morning, I woke up with plenty of time to spare, so I went. I figured that physically walking through the building would help give me some perspective on things that had happened there.

I knew some things had changed…

Back when I was a student, tobacco products were not only allowed, there was an official student smoking lounge. In a school of 2,000 students, with five minutes to get from one class to another, smokers still found time to sprint to the lounge, and to be seen standing there for thirty seconds, casually having a drag as if they’d been there for hours and had nowhere to go.

The interior of the building was, to me, unrecognizable. A major renovation was under way. Those areas that had not been gutted were being used as storage for furniture and equipment from the areas that were being changed, or construction supplies.

Some people brought their kids.

Student council president Darren Kennedy and reunion organizer Jennifer Boresow Burns lead the group up the steps in the photo below. Darren admitted to me later that the “tour” wasn’t actually arranged with the school administrators. There were construction workers everywhere, and the noise of machinery running behind temporary wood and plastic barriers.

I was certain that there was going to be a confrontation with construction workers who wanted us to leave. I admit that I was hoping this would happen. But it didn’t. Upon finding out that one of our classmates was now wheelchair-bound (multiple sclerosis), the foreman gave us the key to the elevator, and asked us to stay out of the areas where heavy work was being done. We continued to tour the school unsupervised.

We found an unlocked classroom, and went in to take some photos of ourselves sitting at the desks. Here, Darren is organizing the photos. He always had a reputation for liking, and being liked by, absolutely everybody. He is now a missionary.

As it happened, the room we had entered was the journalism room. It was nice to see a row of modern computers lined up on the same table where I can remember the old fist-gen beige toaster Macs when I was there in 1986. (The new computers are Mac desktops.)

The journalism room contains a physical archive of all the old yearbooks. Someone found a couple of ours, and we gathered around them, looking each other up.

Who is that handsome devil in the center?

When I pointed to this photo of me as the editor of the literary magazine, those classmates standing near me nodded politely, obviously not remembering that we even had a literary magazine.

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