State of the Reunion

By Tony Kornheiser

Sunday, September 7, 1997; Page F01
The Washington Post 

I'm back from my "guys only" high school reunion in the
Catskills, and I have learned two important things about myself.

1. I don't snore, which is a huge plus when you're sharing a
room. I was in great demand because I didn't snore. Across
the hall, John sounded like a moose trapped in an elevator.
Two different guys tried to trade their roommates for me. I was
the Ken Griffey Jr. of Sack Time.

2. I'm tall.
I never thought of myself as tall. I'm 6 feet even. But I guess
everyone in my high school class has already started shrinking,
because I seemed to be the tallest one there -- I was even
taller than the guys who were on the basketball team! I could
eat off their heads (which in the Catskills is considered
"brunch"). I was waiting for the guys to start singing, "Follow,
follow, follow, follow, follow the yellow brick road." I couldn't
figure out how we ever won a game. Who did we have on our
schedule, the Harmonicats?

I am looking at a photo of the 25 guys who attended the
reunion, and I can honestly say not one of us looks a day over
60 -- and I surely hope that's true 10 years from now when
most of us will actually be 60.

It was a weekend reunion at a hotel. We all ate together,
played some ball and hung out in a conference room smoking
cigars, drinking Scotch, playing poker and telling fabulous
stories from our lives. Here's one: Stanley had this dog, a total
loser, and it was always running away and winding up in a
neighbor's yard. Stanley was routinely called in the middle of
the night to pick up the dog -- whom he hated and would've
happily let loose on the Long Island Expressway. So this one
time the dog bolted, and after it was gone for two weeks
Stanley gratefully gave it up for dead. Then one day Stanley's
wife was out walking, and she swore she heard the dog
barking at her, faintly, from Beyond. "I know this sounds crazy,
but I think Scooter is calling to me," she said. 
Lo and behold, it turned out the dog was in a manhole. 
He had been wandering underground through the town's sewer system for two weeks.

Vet bills for the beast ran into thousands of dollars, including
delousing. A few weeks later, in the dead of winter, the dog
ran away again, and this time they found it in a neighbor's pool,
frozen stiff as Al Gore's butler.

You think that's funny, Tony?

I guess you had to be there. (And drinking heavily.)

This one is better, I think: Stanley made a lot of money in
business, employing hundreds of underpaid laborers. One day
he bumped into another of our classmates in New York, whom
he hadn't seen in 20 years.

"So, what do you do?" Stanley asked Dave.

"I'm a union organizer," Dave said. "What do you do?"

"Um, nothing," Stanley said.

When I got home from the reunion the first thing my kids asked
me was: "Had your high school classmates changed?"

Well, that's not quite true. The first thing my kids asked was:
"Can we go out to dinner?" The second thing was: "How come
I have to take out the dog? I took the dog out last night. Make
Michael take out the dog."

My kids never actually asked me anything about the reunion.
I'm not sure they even knew I had been away. How would
they know? It hadn't been announced on "The Simpsons." But
the point is: Other than adding a few pounds and losing some
hair -- and in one noteable case replacing the lost human hair
with something that appeared to have been ripped from a yak's
underbelly -- the guys hadn't changed much (except for the one
who now, to everybody's amazement, looks exactly like Bea
Arthur). The funny ones were still funny. The quiet ones were
still quiet. The boring ones were still boring. And not
everybody had become a rocket scientist.

For example, at one point we were discussing where to hold
our next reunion, and Steven said, "Let's have it in Puerto Rico,
because that's one of the few states I haven't been to."

Wait, it gets better.

Steven then said, "How many states do we have now?
Fifty-two, right?"

And I said, "Yeah, the continental 48, Alaska, Hawaii, and
then in the last few years we added Puerto Rico and France. It
was in all the papers."

Later in the evening the scholar-athlete of our class, as smart
and handsome as the Robert Redford character in "The Way
We Were," turned to me and asked, completely serious, like
he has been living on the third moon of Jupiter, "What team
does Cal Ripken play for? Is it the Cubs?"

"He came up with the Cubs organization as a baritone," I
corrected, "but was traded to the Utah Jazz for Wayne
Gretzky and Wallace `Two-Ton' Twombley. Later he played
for the Topeka Oysters in the Negro Leagues, and finally
retired to Poughkeepsie, where he runs the numbers racket."

"Oh," was the reply. 

That picture we posed for was taken on the steps of the dining
room of the hotel our last evening there. We'd been together
for 48 hours by then, and you can see the joy in our eyes. But
there were some scratches at the edges. At our age the curve is
no longer going up. Every one of us had our triumphs and our
tragedies, too. Parents were gone. A sister. A wife. There
were children born with terrible defects. There were
operations, chemotherapies, divorces, business reversals. The
gift of the reunion was the chance to reconnect, however
briefly, with the friends we'd known in happier times.

I look at the picture and smile to see that we've become our
fathers. We're fat, old, bald and loud. Some of us have even
started driving Cadillacs. Fifteen years from now they'll have to
wake us up for the next picture; we'll be sleeping off dinner in
the easy chairs in the lobby. I'll be the only one not snoring. 

© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company

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