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+---
+title: '1984'
+date: '2004-01-08T11:32:11-05:00'
+permalink: /nineteen-eighty-four/
+tags:
+    - life
+---
+
+The appearance of my old pal Trent in the [comments](/two_days_later/) below reminds me: I’m fast approaching an altogether alarming milestone — the 20-year high school reunion.
+
+Which means that I’ve lived (in my case, substantively, due to having been a year ahead in school) longer *since* graduating from high school than I had up to that day. Somehow that doesn’t seem possible; despite having all-too-readily kicked the dust of high school from my feet, with nary a glance backward, those four years seem in some sense too psychically present to be so far into the past.
+
+I do a quick check of the intervening years: 4 years college, 3 years MFA program, 2 years in over-hyped “real world,” 5 years grad school, 6 years here at the College Just South of the Hill. The math works. It really has been 20 years. Impossible, and yet empirically so.
+
+I’m planning on going home for the reunion, assuming I find out when it is. I missed the 10-year gathering, in part because I’d just re-started grad school, just moved to New York, and was excruciatingly broke. And in part because the list of the weekend’s events included a family picnic (“bring the kids!”), and I just wasn’t ready to see the folks who’d tormented and encouraged me, those *kids*, as breeders.
+
+But immediately after the reunion passed, I started thinking about people who hadn’t crossed my mind in years, people who weren’t within my closest circle of friends and enemies, but who’d been in nearly every class I took for those four years, and who’d been the kind of acquaintance you expect always to see, whose absence can go unremarked for ages until suddenly you think — good grief — what ever happened to Amy Wise? Or Margot Engelmann? Or Tim Randolph?
+
+It was an odd time to graduate from high school — Orwell’s year, Reagan’s year — not the ideal moment to feel yourself coming into adulthood, perhaps. But the years since have been really good to me, and I hope to much of the rest of the class of 1984, too. I’m finally ready to go back and find out where everyone is, offspring and all.
+
+See you there, Trent.
+