The photos show them arranged in an unbalanced half-circle, the 35 or so stalwarts who made it to the 50th reunion of the Class of ’71. Some are seated, the rest standing, and just like in school, not everyone is looking at the camera.
My 50th high school reunion came off as scheduled over the weekend; it was on the other side of the state near the tiny collapsed mining town where I ostensibly grew up, despite plenty of conflicting evidence.
The relatively small gathering from a graduating class of 202 was doubtless due in part to demonically high COVID numbers, or at least that was my excuse. Not to get wistful about it (that sometimes happens when I get Taco Bell), but I’ve rarely been so conflicted about pandemic strategy, rarely been so regretful as I was this week, looking at the shared photos of those fine classmates.
After essentially mainlining coronavirus news coverage for most of the last 18 months, after frequent visits to that enchanted place where I thought I actually knew the intricacies of COVID do’s and don’ts, I still came to the declarative deadline for my 50th reunion in abject conflict.
Fear would be an interchangeable noun right there.
A quick glance in any direction reveals the extent of our ignorance on all of this, again, 18 months into it. In Pittsburgh, one week we’re canceling the Labor Day Parade “out of an abundance of caution,” the next we’re staging the St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Not St. Patrick’s Day out of, what, a reckless disregard for caution? One night on TV I’m watching 109,000 people sitting on each other’s laps in Penn State’s Beaver Stadium, which has no vaccine mandate and obviously no mask mandate, and it’s barely two weeks after I learn that Louisiana State University isn’t letting anyone into its stadium without proof of vaccination.
I could go on, and I have, but there’s no point in making it any more clear that we don’t know what we’re doing. Despite more than a century of scientific advancement in virology, immunology and accumulated research on infectious deceases, the U.S. this week eclipsed the death toll from the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.
The majority of the 675,000 deaths in America were preventable, yet the trajectory remains ominous. We’ll get to 800,000 by the end of the year, in all likelihood, through some lethal cocktail of distrust and dumbassery and political duplicity. The New York Times pointed out Monday that over the past two weeks, adjusted for population, America’s death rate is twice Britain’s, seven times Canada’s, 10 times Germany’s.
Exacerbating all of it is the coverage. As Dr. Monica Ghandi, an infectious disease scholar at the University of California, San Francisco wrote, “the messaging over the last month in the U.S. has basically served to terrify the vaccinated and make unvaccinated, eligible adults doubt the effectiveness of the vaccines.”
Though the delta variant moves in still mysterious ways, neither of those interpretations is correct. For the vaccinated, the risks of getting COVID remain small, even smaller for getting extremely sick from it.
That’s what I think I know; I just don’t know it in a way that makes me perfectly comfortable indoors with people who’ve become strangers at an event like the one in these reunion photos.
But if I look hard at the faces, I can find the ancient smiles of a more carefree era. We all went to a high school that didn’t even exist when we were little. It sprang from four fast-shrinking districts along Route 209 where it slogged past shuttered coal mines and climbed into the Poconos. It was early “American Rust,” but we were mostly in the business of fun: defining it, arranging it, ensuring it.
We helped each other sort things out, mostly things like why is she with him, why is he with her, why is it that one guy keeps channeling poetry, even if it was lightly borrowed from that episode of “The Munsters” where Herman hosts a poetry night for young beatniks?
Life is bold
Life is earnest
When it’s cold,
Turn up the furnace.
And, for me anyway, his greatest verse, quoting his mother:
Get up, get up,
Get up you fool!
Or you’ll miss the bus for the Vo-Tech school.
These towns were quiet like no place I’ve been since. They were miles from the nearest four-lane. On a clear anthracite night, you could hear a beer being cracked open two blocks away, the only other endemic sound the low growl of heavy equipment working some distant slag heap long after the last church bells chimed.
The sound the Class of ’71 brought to it blared on 8-track players from open cars windows — Creedence, the Beatles, Donovan, Sly and the Family Stone and, though some couldn’t own it because we were just too damn cool, the Beach Boys. I swear. God help me, Rhonda.
Someone told me once that your real friends get made in high school. They’re not your work friends, and they’re not friends like those you make because your kids go to school with their kids; they’re not friends like any other. They were just the people you were comfortable with, even if you didn’t understand why or even care to, even if you never would.
On Saturday night, they looked happy, which is how I remember them. Long may they run.
Gene Collier: gcollier@post-gazette.com and Twitter: @genecollier.
First Published: September 22, 2021, 4:00 a.m.
Updated: September 22, 2021, 10:58 a.m.
