sps – Kelley Eskridge

Greetings and cheers to everyone in the Dream Pub. This one is my round, while I explain where I’ve been – up to my ears in ASL studies and events, banging my head against the new book, and working on a project, more about which below. Lots of doing with not enough time for thinking or feeling or just being, until recently.

Some of it’s just timing, the conjunction of: end of the term in ASL school with the attendant papers and exams and commitments; the latest issue of the newsletter that I do layout for; a certain number of happy but inconvenient social activities; and emotional and practical preparations for a Big Event.

Last weekend I went to my 25th high school reunion at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. Exuberance alert: my years at school were an incredibly special time and place for me, and I am still bubbling from my reunion experience. I will not dwell on the relative unhappiness of grammar school, although if anyone really wants to hear the story of the 4th grade history teacher, just ask… And from that, I went to four years of living and learning and growing in a place of privilege and dreams. To this socially isolated low-income kid from the South, it was Narnia. I walked through an unexpected door into a magical place where I could dare to connect, learn how to think, practice autonomy, flex my imagination, use my brains. Challenge my assumptions. Invent a self I liked better. Change my prospects. A place where I had some measure of personal power. All of this tucked away in nearly 2,000 acres of old brick buildings and woods and lakes and sky, where it was dark enough at night to see the stars and I always felt safe.

Of course, it mattered that I didn’t have the right clothes or vacation destinations. I learned some hard lessons about different worlds, about class and status and behavior. I experienced the impact of other people’s assumptions. I made a lot of assumptions of my own. Blah, blah. Going there was one of the five best decisions I’ve ever made. It shaped me in ways I’m still learning to understand.

So: it’s 25 years later and here comes the reunion. There was no question about going: it’s been on my radar for a couple of years. I decided several months ago that I’d like to give a gift to my Form (i.e. my class, the Form of 1978) – a compilation CD of music that was playing in our dorms, our dances, in the Coffeehouse where we went to smoke cigarettes at night. The organizers liked the idea well enough that it became one of the official reunion mementos. So for the last couple of months I’ve been selecting music (my choices and suggestions from classmates), editing the mix into a 2-CD set, and making an insert booklet and labels. The booklet includes a high-school photo of everyone I could find, roughly 125 people.

I had a great time doing this. It was a huge amount of work, but that’s what makes it a gift. And it helped me be ready to go into the reunion with my arms and mind and heart wide open, and no expectations. Even though I didn’t exchange more than a few words with some of these folks for the entire time we were in school, we were still a part of the fabric of each other’s daily lives. We lived in dorms together. We ate our meals in each other’s company. We were on teams and in clubs and at the Coffeehouse together. We passed each other in various stages of inebriation on the way to or from the woods on Saturday nights. We grew up together, and what I learned this weekend is that it matters. In some ways these people are my family.

So here we came, more than half of us, mostly happy with ourselves, eager to see each other, with the adolescent divisions seemingly dissolved, or at least in abeyance. I heard so many fascinating stories and had a glimpse of such different lives. Some of the re-connections will last, and some will not survive the daily distractions of all our lives, but that’s just details: the bottom line is we had so much fucking fun that it makes me smile to write about it, and it was the kind of fun that comes from being connected, even on the most tenuous level, for more than half our lives. Another lesson: the wheel goes around.

Unreformed: SPS 1978 – Disc 1