My high School class (Cullman High, Cullman, Alabama: 1969) will be having our 50th reunion this summer. That fact starkly stands before me as an ultimately sobering thought. Life has its “odometer” moments: turning 21, 30, 50, 60. And one’s 50th high school reunion jumps right up there like a giant neon sign on life’s highway. Just doing the math gives one pause to consider all the water that’s passed under all those bridges, including the ones I burned behind me.
I’ve been designated as the “technical guru” for a group of people who, by and large, preceded by about 10 years that cohort that became comfortable with computers, either by growing up with them, or being forced to adapt to them. My classmates generally missed that bus. I am the outlier: for a variety of reasons, many accidental, my career path lead me right out on the bleeding edge of technology. I spent 35 years at Intergraph, a company that has been pushing technical boundaries in computer graphics since 1969 (it was a coincidence they started when I graduated from high school. Or was it? Gibbs (NCIS) Rule 39. Look it up).
Anyway, as almost the sole person in my class who actually knows how all this stuff works, I took it upon myself to build a fairly involved web site for our 40th reunion. That magic was highly appreciated by my less computer literate classmates (“any sufficiently advanced tehnology is indistinguishable from magic to the uninitiated” – Arthur C. Clarke, more or less). So much so that I was prevailed upon to update the effort for our 50th (“No good deed goes unpunished.” – Wicked). In so doing, I decided to make better quality images from my senior annual. Which brings me at long last to the crux of my essay.
As I went through the process of scanning each page from the Senior section, then cutting and adjusting the individual photos, I could not help but reflect on those faces, faces from 50 years ago, many of which I never saw again after leaving those “hallowed halls.” Oh, there were several who were good friends, and not as many who remained good friends: life sends us down whatever paths it will, and divergence is almost guaranteed to some degree. But there were many faces I never really knew, names that had never been imprinted on my mind, people whose lives had never really even crossed mine, not then, nor in the intervening years.
I am keenly aware that high school is in many ways no longer remotely comparable to the way it was in 1969. Beyond the bedrock of how and what things are taught, the norms and mores of teenage life cannot be more drastically different when today’s youth go to high school than when the Ancient Ones (ie, me and my cohorts) attended school. Music, language, pasttimes… there is likely no aspect of modern teenage life that I would understand. And likely be astonished by. Hell, the cell phone alone has forever redefined not only teenage life, but even what it means to be a social entity on this planet.
Nevertheless, I would be willing to wager a considerable sum that one aspect of high school life is still in effect. Groups still form, cliques coalesce, exclusion exists. That is basic human nature. As is the concomitant cruelty that teenagers so easily and carelessly inflict on each other.
My point is that this eternal social dynamic was obviously also in effect in 1969. We all gravitated into our social circles, orbiting around each other, obeying an implicit hierarchy of “coolness” and awareness, and all trying hard to present a worldly knowledge that we were all stumbling around trying to learn. But the hard rules of cliqueishness too often raised impenetrable walls between “Us” and “Them”, however us and them were defined.
And so, in the three years I attended Cullman High, I only partially knew so many of my fellow stumblers. I may have never shunned people (I pray to God I did not), but then I never went out of my way to engage them either. The Comfort Zone of the Clique is a powerful insulation, and nothing ever happened to push me out of that zone.
Now, I am looking at all those pictures, closely. Age may not bring wisdom, but I do believe it has given me an awareness of Intelligence and Awareness when I see it someone’s face. The eyes, really. But all those decades ago, like everyone else, I only saw superficial exteriors. And I missed so much. I can see in so many of those faces in my annual the Light that I have learned to recognize and treasure. The glimmer of clarity and awareness that signal real curiosity and awareness.
Now it is five decades further down everyone’s world line. The people in those pictures have all gone on to become whatever life lead them to be. I know, without knowing the specifics, that for far too many, their path lead to some form of extinguishing that Light. Life is long. Life is hard. It is not fair, and circumstances too often simply beat down the human spirit until it can do nothing but wake up every day and go to sleep every night. On automatic.
Some will have gone on to do great things, creative things. They are the ones in whom that Light I see in those photographs never died, but instead blossomed and burned brightly. There will be some who have made a life of giving care and comfort and solace. There will be many (most?) who will have turned in the end to a deep form of religion, thinking themselves in personal communion with God and Jesus (this is Alabama, and therefore satori is much less likely). By the same calculus, it is likely many (most?) will even be Trump supporters. My own bias leads me to believe that those individuals will have been the ones whom life beat down the most. But who can say? The human animal is nothing if not a walking mass of contradictions.
The lesson, learned too late for almost everyone but the saintly and truly spiritual, is to somehow overcome the willful stupidity that we adopt so early and so easily. To recognize the Potential and Inner Mounting Flame that burns in people and places where we do not believe it can. And to not ignore it when we feel it.
© 2019 Chuck Puckett