John's class is having their fiftieth reunion. At the planning meeting some months ago, there was a discussion about whose house would be good for hosting an event. Since we live in walking distance to the hubbub of that weekend, ours was put on the calendar.
Except that neither John nor I was at the meeting.
A few days later someone on the committee realized the faux pas and reached out to us. We laughed. It was fine to include us. Hence, our home is listed as one of a string of social gatherings packed into four days of reminiscing. At a more recent meeting
which I did attend, there was shared excitement about the details coming together. I noticed that there was attention given to accessibility, and more than once people asked others in the room to speak up. It turns out that the common denominator for everyone is age. Those bodies, once vibrant and supple, are slowing down.
We humans inhabit that fulcrum that swings
between being unique and ordinary. The other day I got a call from someone I have not heard from in a while, and was surprised how quickly I knew who it was. Voices are our auditory fingerprint, with nuance that can hardly be measured. Maybe there are scans that can spit out graphs depicting the tone and timbre of a given spate of speech. Kudos to those audiologists who understand such things. For me, it is simply a miracle.
Yet we are united in that we have a voice at all, God willing. For reasons I cannot articulate, I find delight in the marriage of those seemingly divergent truths. This reunion will be a window through which to glimpse how fifty students plunked into the same school in a single graduating class, have split into as many directions. I look forward to a medley of both conversations.
"I remember when we all..."
and
"You did what?!"
