Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

The group touring the auditorium

We met the Class President at 11 a.m. at the high school for a tour of the renovated building. A lot of work had been done there since we graduated 15 years ago.

Even before 11 a.m., it was a busy day for The Gryphon and I. We started it out at a local shoe store, to get him a new pair of dress shoes. The store proprietor has training in fitting shoes properly, so the entire process took about a half hour.

I told The Gryphon, though, that he'll never find another pair of shoes that fits this well. We had enough time to get coffee before driving to the high school to meet everyone for the 11 a.m. tour.

Pulling up right beside me in the parking lot was the Flute Player. She'd been a great friend of mine in high school and had once skipped class to help me deal with my emotions after getting dumped by a guy we both later agreed wasn't worth crying over.

Her 3-year-old son was with her, and I said, "Oh, you look just like the picture I saw of you."

My friend corrected me. "That was his older brother. He's 13 now."

"It's been awhile." We exchanged contact information right away, so as not to forget later.

It didn't take us long to figure out the extent of the changes: the entire front facade had been changed, adding on a massive auditorium, which had a seating capacity of about twice the one we'd had.

Our auditorium, by comparison, had been small, dark and been lined, at the top of the walls, by flags representing various nations who had sent exchange students our way. The flags had been dusty, and some of those nations hadn't existed for years.

The school has renewed its interest in performing school musicals and plays. This my brother would find ironic, because his class was the only class which wasn't permitted to put on a performance. Instead, he joined a local theater group with me and had a great time in the chorus of "Oklahoma."

As we continued towards the main administrative office, the Drum Major and I remarked that the windows of the concourse were missing. One of the more unruly trumpet players had once been put through one of those windows. The general consensus was that he must have deserved it, although none of us could remember what he'd done. He has since been in and out of prison, which is doubly ironic when you consider his father is a police officer.

We band members had spent a lot of time in the former auditorium, because the practice space for the band had been in the back portion of it, behind the stage. This area also served as a green room during school productions.

The old auditorium has been filled in and now serves as the library, which houses about twice as many books as it used to.

I never spent much time in the high school library, because I had a library card at the local university and did all my research there. The high school library was pathetic in comparison. I'm thinking, though, that maybe I'll find out the process of donating books to the high school. I'm sure they could use more poetry, and comedy, for that matter.

From there, we toured the new gymnasium, which is twice as big as the one we had. In fact, the high school gym was so inadequate that it was seldom used for anything but physical education classes.

All of the major events, such as basketball games and dances, were held in the junior high school gym, next door. The junior high school, incidentally, has now been converted into a middle school, with students in grades six through eight. I bet they just love being in "middle school" in eighth grade.

From here we continued to the classrooms, most of which had seen only moderate renovations. In the room which used to be our class advisor's, where I spent countless hours laborious proofing our senior yearbook. As coeditor, I was also extremely busy with other activities, so I turned over much of the creative portion of the job to my partner and took care of the more mundane editing tasks.

This room has now been turned into a classroom for special needs kids, who had apparently been asked to create signs that said something about both their weaknesses and their strengths. This one hung above the door.

Oh, to be immature, unorganized and fun! Come to think of it ...

The hallways looked virtually unchanged except for the addition of extra lockers and the conversion of some of the smaller rooms into spacious bathrooms. The Flute Player and I found this amusing, particularly when we noticed they'd converted the old band equipment room -- a musty, nasty mess -- into a bathroom.

"It's cleaner now," she said. And she was right.

One of my classmates had brought her young son along, who just started school himself. He eagerly took off down the ugly yellow tiled hallway, as if he'd found the Hall of Gold, leading to great eventualities.

Upstairs, the new journalism lab was in full swing, with students preparing the first issue of the school paper for this school year.

"The kids have classes on weekends now?" the Flute Player asked.

"We always worked on weekends," I said.

But when we did, our workspace never looked like this:

In fact, our journalism classroom looked rather more like this:

Yes, that's me on the right, looking dead serious; probably in part because of that hair cut. The papers spread out in front of us were most likely the dummy sheets we used to mock up the paper. Our articles had to be typeset elsewhere, proofed, and then waxed.

I can hear the conversation now:

Student: My computer just crashed!

Me: We used to dream of having computers crash! We had to have our articles typeset and waxed. Then you cut it apart with a bloody sharp knife and you had to make it fit on the page by cutting it apart and using levels and knives and border tape... with our tongues! And when we got it done, our instructor would kill us and dance around on our graves, singing Halleluia!

But you try to tell the kids of today that, and they won't believe you.

The cafeteria was all set for the homecoming dance that night, with tablecloths on the tables. A new concourse area has been built, which also houses a school store and a concession stand for the basketball games.

The Flute Player and I, however, took great glee in noting that the ugly orange chairs are exactly the same ones we used. And I wouldn't doubt that the tables are the same, too. We joked that 40 years from now, the chairs would still be in use, though everything else in the school may have changed.

For some reason, this thought comforted us.

More thoughts on my 15th reunion:

May 14, 2003 - 15 Years?

September 4, 2003 - Reunion Plotting

September 10, 2003 - Reunion Snag

October 16, 2003 - Reunion Countdown

October 24, 2003 - Idle Thoughts

October 28, 2003 - Homecoming

October 30, 2003 - Catching Up

Copyright 2003 by Alyce Wilson

Musings Index

What do you think? Share your thoughts
at Alyce's message board (left button):