Forest Hill High School 1971 Yearbook
The first person I ran into after picking up my nametag at the cocktail reception for my 40th high school reunion was Kathy Talley.
“Oh my god! Don Hogle!” she exclaimed. (She said the full three words rather than “OMG!” “Text” wasn’t a transitive verb when we were in high school; it was just conjoined with “book” to make a rather dull noun.) But “oh my god” would be a frequent exclamation throughout the weekend.
We hugged and kissed while a wordless spouse stood patiently by. (Another frequent occurrence throughout the weekend.)
Kathy and I had lived in the same neighborhood since sixth grade, so our acquaintance pre-dated even junior high school.
“I remember we used to play basketball in you driveway. And one day, you climbed up this tree and fell and broke your wrist or something,” she went on. I have no memory of this event and was beginning to wonder if she was confusing me with someone else in the neighborhood.
“Your mother was really angry with us. I remember she was so protective of you and your sister.” O.K., well, there her memory was spot on, so maybe it was my memory that was at fault.
This mismatch of memories would happen again and again during the reunion. Like the guy who recalled running my lunchbox up a flagpole in 5th grade and making me cry. (He didn’t even apologize when he mentioned it!) Or I would have a crystal-clear memory of someone, which was completely lost on them.
My 40th reunion was the first I attended. There had been the 10th, the 20th and the 30th. If I knew about them, I didn’t go. I hadn’t stayed in touch with anyone from high school. I felt no particular longing for my high school days. When I mentioned to friends that I was going to my 40th, most of them said, “Why?”
I didn’t have a good answer; after 40 years, I just wanted to go. And why I’d never felt that urge before, I couldn’t explain. It wasn’t like I hated high school. I had meaningful friendships and experiences.
Yes, I was disappointed when I wasn’t elected student council president. Debi Elfin, a friend who was a year older than me and a cheerleader, broke the bad news to me on the evening of the election; she was one of the ones counting the votes. She came by my house and picked me up in her convertible. (I’m not certain she actually had a convertible, but in my memory she did, and it suits the story better if she does.) We went to a drive-in hamburger place downtown and Debi consoled me. “You give your all for your school,” she told me, “until it hurts. And then, even though it hurts, you just have to keep on giving.”
Looking back, and with the benefit of more than a few years of therapy, I’m not so sure that’s the best advice. I’m reminded of that old joke when a patient says, “Doc, every time I do this, it hurts,” and the doctor replies, “Well, don’t do that.” But it was sweet of her to want to make me feel better, and I never forget a kindness. (Unlike having my lunchbox run up a flagpole.)
If anything, I’d just moved on. If there was something I was escaping, it was the over-protective mother Kathy Talley remembered. “Hang on,” my father used to say, when my mother had pestered him into having a talk with me about some imagined wrong I’d committed. “You’ll be gone soon enough when you leave for college. In the meantime, try not to aggravate your mother.” Several years after college when I was in New York, he moved out and divorced my mother. I guess he’d hung on long enough.
Indeed, I blossomed when I went away to college. I pursued what interested me. I studied languages and literature. I wrote poetry. I joined the theater crowd and craved my moments of glory on the stage. There was a saying in the theater about performing — “Don’t sell it. Go out there and just give it away!” Echoes of Debi Elfin.
I was creating. And like most creative people, I was also creating myself.
I fell in love — that wonderful, anguished torture of first love. I understood for the first time what the words “I love you” meant, words I don’t recall my parents speaking to me. And, of course, I came to understand my sexuality: how could you be a complete person passing through puberty and adolescence without knowing the true nature of your feelings of love and desire?
I left West Palm Beach, and I moved on. I shed one skin and took on a new mantle. As I would many times without hesitation in the ensuing years, some would say courageously, others carelessly perhaps. I moved to New York to be an actor. I became disillusioned with the theater and somehow found my way into a successful career in advertising at a bank. After 11 years, I left the bankers to join an agency, so I could be among my creative peers and continue to grow. After 12 more years, I cut my work to four days a week with a 20% pay cut in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression, so that I could devote more time to my own creative pursuits; I started this blog.
Often, I made these changes wholesale. I changed a lynchpin element of my life, and everything else — friendships, acquaintances, activities, living arrangements, whole locales — changed with it. What “was” was swept away in deference to and in pursuit of what “could be.”
I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but at some point I became sensitive to the loss that occurred each time I made these changes. I think I noticed something about my sister, who’d made as many sweeping changes in her life as had I. She’d stayed in touch with people from those past lives. She was always reconnecting. I recognized the richness that lay in my past, and I wanted to retrieve it. I wanted to feel the full length of the thread of my life and not just its present end.
I began to make a concerted effort to maintain relationships despite moving on. And I began to reach back, whenever the opportunity presented itself, to reconnect with people who had been important to me. That’s why I went to my 40th high school reunion. To retrieve some of that feeling of re-union that lay that far back.
There was a beautiful moment that occurred as I was fixing my stick-on nametag to my shirt, when I first saw Kathy Talley and heard her say, “Oh my god! Don Hogle!” Despite the total absence of any connection for 40 years, when we looked into each other’s eyes, I had a rush of feeling. A remembrance of everything I liked about Kathy swept through me like a tsunami of goodness.
It was a wonderful moment, and it would repeat itself more than once that weekend.
Donna Denning became a good friend in the last year or two of high school. It was 1970. Some parents had sued the local school board and the dress code was dropped. I let my hair grow. Took yoga. Went to a rock festival. Smoked pot. Protested the war. Donna was a bit on the fringe. I liked going there with her, though — as she reminded me at the reunion — I always “straddled the mainstream.”
I’ve never forgotten two things Donna said to me in high school. I’d gotten new glasses that were probably the wrong prescription. I’d complained about them, and she suggested that maybe they weren’t right. That a doctor could make a mistake seemed impossible to the mainstream-straddling part of me. “He told me it would take a while to get used to them,” I told her. “You can get used to anything,” she said, “but it doesn’t make it right.” At times, remembering that gave me the courage to admit that I didn’t need to accept something just because “that’s the way it is.”
And then once, commenting on a friend of hers who was gay, I said, “I don’t know anyone else who is gay.” “Yes, you do,” she presciently replied, “you just don’t know it yet.” I remember going over a mental list of people we knew, wondering whom she meant.
Martha Townsend went to Holy Trinity Episcopal Church with me and had a mother who was probably as over-protective as mine. We reminisced about the time my best friend Jay Estabrooke and I showed up at Martha’s house on our bikes late one night, and she got in trouble for it. Jay and I were camping out in my backyard, and he was dating Martha at the time. I wouldn’t have known the term for it then, but I was Jay’s wingman. Today Martha lives in the exact same house. In an email after the reunion, she wrote, “I will be sure to look you up, if ever I find myself in NYC. And you know right where I am; you found it once in the dark.”
Mark Robson was our senior class president and another “mainstream-straddler. ” My high school yearbook has several notations from Mark, disavowing in some way his role as class president, as if it were an embarrassment rather than an honor.
When my father died in 1995, Mark’s parents, who attended my father’s church, came to his memorial service. I was touched they were there; they were the same warm and loving people I remembered from my high school days. Mark had hosted an alternative party to the senior prom, which we called the “Pseudo-Prom,” at his house. Or, as Posie Fischer reminded me, the “Puh-Suede-Oh” prom, as our friend Bobby Wyckoff famously mispronounced it. I remember talking with Mark’s parents and his grandmother — while under the influence of some rather potent weed — before rapturously listening to the mesmerizing harmonies of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young on their stereo.
Posie left a lengthy citation in my yearbook. In part it says, “I sincerely thank you for teaching me, for liking me, for sharing with me a part of yourself. I have benefited from knowing you these last 6 years. And I hope I will continue like this for the rest of my life… I hope you realize I care a great deal about you and everything you do.”
I hope I wrote something equally as sweet in her yearbook. Of course we didn’t continue like that. We went our separate ways. But forty years later, when I saw Posie, all those tender feelings were still there, just as if the ink had barely dried on the inside front cover of my yearbook.
One of my favorite poems is ”The Silken Tent” by Robert Frost. Despite the fact that he writes about a woman – the “she” of the first line – it could be a poem about me, a single man. It perfectly describes the nature of my many relationships and my nature in relationships.
The Silken Tent
by Robert Frost
She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when the sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To every thing on earth the compass round,
And only by one’s going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.
A reunion is just what the word says – a joining together again, a re-union, a slight tautening of the “silken ties of love and thought” to remind us they are there. Those ties are so strong, they can withstand an absence of forty years. And in the warm, humid, South Florida summer air, they tugged at the heart ever so deliciously in the ocean breeze.
