Mostly, the Class of '76 turned 48 (or will soon enough). I'll answer the title question a bit more later, but first the personal news. The week before I went on vacation was hectic, with various administrative things to do for my new job, pre-vacation household stuff, and a bit of a social flurry. I had an entirely insane evening where I went to a happy hour for a guy from my company who was leaving my old organization, another happy hour for a professional society, and then had dinner with my friend, Penny, who was in town from L.A. for a convention. It was a relief to collapse onto the train to New York for the first leg of my vacation.
As for the vacation, I'll write a travelogue soon. (I even know where the USB cable for my digital camera is!) The short version is that my trip to Poland was just okay. There were some interesting things, e.g. the towns my mother's family came from. And Krakow is certainly a beautiful city. But everything was tempered by the stress of traveling with my mother. She's tired, she doesn't feel well, her hands hurt, she needs me to open a packet of sugar for her tea, she's too cold, it's raining - all in all, Mom is well on her way to winning the power-kvetching championship. It almost made me wish she hadn't quit smoking a couple of months ago, as that might have calmed her down. What drove me nuts the most is that she kept repeating her favorite story to anyone who would listen at all. Somewhere, on a remote island that's part of, say, Vanuatu, there is a tribe that is so primitive that nobody has ever told them that both Mom's parents were from Poland but they met and married in Havana, Cuba. It isn't that I don't like the story of how they met, but I didn't think it was all that appropriate when Mom decided to tell it to our museum guide at Auschwitz, who was trying to tell us about an exhibit.
But we got back to New York without matricide. I called my brother when we got home and told him I needed to prove to him that I got her home intact. He immediately said, "But what about your mental health?" I am, if nothing else, reasonably resilient. I also need that resilience to cope with the Red Sox collapse at the hands of the Source of All Evil in the Universe.
I got back to D.C. on Tuesday and handled some of the post-vacation flurry (e.g. dealing with mail). I'm getting settled in at my new job and even have a computer and network connectivity now. I spent a ridiculous amount of time on getting my remote access to my company's network up and working. They had to move me from one server (which is going away) to another, but there was all sorts of oddness in how my email profile was set up. Fortunately, we have a support person who is actually helpful, and she spent hours (2 hours on Thursday and all morning on Friday) getting it working. All is good now, so maybe I will actually be able to be productive this week.
That is, assuming I recover from the weekend. I drove up to New York to go to my 30th high school reunion. I took advantage of actually going up by car for a change to take a detour to Valley Forge, where I did one of the year-round Volksmarch events. The creek trail was hillier than I'd realized it would be and I got a good workout. There's also less shade than I would have hoped for. I was also disgustingly hot and sweaty by the time I got back to my car, making me extremely grateful for effective air conditioning! I made a dubious decision to go east on I-76 to get back to I-95, which put me into Philadelphia traffic. In retrospect, it would have been better to have continued north to the Pennsylvania turnpike and gotten to the Jersey turnpike that way. The other traffic chokepoint was the Verrazano Bridge and the Belt Parkway. I have decided that the latter is the Route of All Evil. But I got to my Mom's with plenty of time and announced "I need a cup of tea and a shower, not necessarily in that order."
The reunion was fun, with a few surprises. I think it was remarkably brave of Norman to show up with his boyfriend. I was astonished that Per came all the way from Denmark. It took me a little while to place him and then I remembered I knew him mostly out of alphabetical order, which put us in the same home room and gave us adjacent lockers! (Linda, who had the locker on the other side of me, wasn't there.) Some people I recognized right off, some I remembered as soon as I saw their name tags, and others I have no clue at all about. Several people remarked on having seen me on Jeopardy - which was nearly 20 years ago!
I have to wonder how many of the folks who didn't come didn't even know about the reunion, although I suppose the internet does help in tracking things down. In general, I'd say we aged reasonably well. There was all the usual chit chat of where we live and what work we do and marital status and children. There are fewer divorces than I'd expect and more people who've moved back to Long Island. I feel less guilty about not really staying in touch with people when I realize almost nobody else has. I guess that's natural when you move away and have other interests.
This morning I filled up the car with everything Mom has been nagging me to get out of the house for years. The drive back wasn't too bad, with the only slowdowns being a bit of the Route of All Evil (just before the Verrazano) and one stretch of I-95 in Delaware, where four lanes merged into two. I decided that Maryland has the best roads in the region and I found one thing in favor of Virginia road signs, which I've mocked more or less since I arrived here. They may never identify an exit the same way twice and they may plant trees in front of any sign which is actually helpful, but at last the Virginia Department of Transportation uses an exit numbering scheme that tells you how many miles the next exit is and puts up signs telling the distances to various towns. North of Maryland, you have no way of knowing how much further it is to go to any destination besides the next service area on the highway.
After stopping to pick up a few things at the supermarket, I got home about 4 this afternoon and only partially unloaded the car. I figured I can bring things in out of the trunk over the next few days. I pretty much collapsed for the afternoon, taking a long nap and doing pretty much nothing else. But there are some odds and ends I need to get done before I go to bed. Miles to go before I sleep ...
Copyright 2006 Miriam H. Nadel