Three Dog Night – "Celebrate" (1969)

Dress up tonight

Why be lonely?

You'll stay home and you'll be lonesome

Why be lonely?

Celebrate, celebrate, dance to the music

[Note: This post originally appeared almost exactly five years ago, just before my 40th high school reunion.  After some minor editing, I'm reposting it today –which is the day before my 45th reunion kicks off.  (Tempus certainly does fugit, boys and girls.)]

A 45th high-school reunion in Joplin, Missouri, is hardly a "celebrity ball."  And I doubt that any of the girls I'll see there will be wearing satin and lace.  (Sorry, ladies -- you may be 62 or 63 years old, but it's hard not to think of you as "girls.") 

But no matter.  It will still be an occasion to celebrate.  

What exactly will we be celebrating?  Some of us can celebrate success in a career or a business.  (I'm not just talking about money.  I'm talking about the satisfaction you get from doing something well, and the recognition and respect you receive from your customers or your employer or your peers.)  

Others can celebrate their children, or grandchildren, and the pride and joy they bring – and is there anything in life more celebrate-able?

At the very least, we can all celebrate just being here.  Some of us have already survived close calls, and know from very personal experience that life isn't something to be taken for granted.  The fact that so many of our classmates – not to mention parents and other loved ones – are no longer around to join the celebration should make that very clear to the rest of us.

What I'm especially celebrating this weekend is growing up in Joplin, where I spent almost every day of the first 18 years of life.   It was what I experienced here that made me the person I am today – for better and for worse.  

Certainly my parents were the most important influence in my life.  (I'm sometimes told – not necessarily in a complimentary tone of voice – that I am getting more like my father every year.  That is absolutely true, and it doesn't bother me a bit.  He and my mother have accomplished a lot after starting out with very little, and my sister and I owe them more than we can ever repay.)  

But my teachers (especially Mary Helen Harutun, a truly remarkable and dedicated woman who taught piano to quite a few of us) and my friends were very significant influences as well.

I moved to the Washington, DC, area after I finished law school over 38 years ago, so I've lived here a lot longer than I lived in Joplin (even accounting for for brief detours to San Francisco and Philadelphia). 

But where I live now is not really my home – Joplin is, and always will be.  For better or worse (in the words of Little Big Town's "Boondocks"):

You can take it or leave it

This is me

This is who I am     

The last few years have really brought that home.  I can't overstate what an impact all the old photos that have been posted to the reunion's Facebook page have had on me.  

I've seen familiar faces that have been lost to me for many years – I've allowed "out of sight" to become "out of mind" far too easily – but it turns out those faces were not really forgotten.  Seeing them has triggered all kinds of wonderful and surprisingly intense memories.  And the memories that have resurfaced have all been happy ones.

The Dugout Lounge at Mickey
Mantle's Holiday Inn in Joplin

The reunion will be a great opportunity to see many of the friends with whom I have kept in touch over the years.  Just as important, it will be a chance to really connect with other classmates for the first time.  I've already struck up some friendships with people I didn't really know in high school, or that I barely knew, and I hope those friendships will continue in some form after the reunion is over.  

It wouldn't be honest of me if I were to deny that this whole experience has also been somewhat bittersweet. 

One thing the reunion is forcing me (and, I suspect, many others) to do is to to look back and take stock of where I've been and where I am – and where I'm going as well.  It's impossible for me to look at all those pictures from 40 and even 50 years ago without regrets – regrets for all the mistakes I've made, regrets for all the things I wish I had done but didn't . . . but mostly regrets from (to quote from a book I recently read) "the realization there [are] a lot more leaves on the ground than on the tree."  

I can't resist sharing some quotes from my favorite poet and my favorite novelist from my high-school days, both of whom had a lot to say on this subject.

From William Wordsworth's "Ode (Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood)":

O joy! that in our embers

Is something that doth live,

That nature yet remembers

What was so fugitive!

The thought of our past years in me doth breed

Perpetual benediction . . .

Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind . . .

In the faith that looks through death,

In years that bring the philosophic mind.

(I need that "philosophic mind" right now -- I hope I don't have to wait much longer for it to arrive.)

And from The Great Gatsby (by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was laid to rest only a few miles from where I've lived for the past 25 years, and whose tombstone bears these words):

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.  

F. Scott Fitzgerald's tombstone
in Rockville, Maryland

That's not altogether a bad thing, in my opinion.  Life in Joplin when we were young was actually wonderfully multilayered and rich.  It was a time of intense curiosity and intense feelings.  To paraphrase the song I quoted earlier, you can take it or leave it -- high school is us, high school is who we are.

Well, that's it from me – my last post before the reunion.  I've been talking a lot, and now I'm going to concentrate on listening for a change.   I look forward to seeing – and listening to – all of you in Joplin (or elsewhere, if you can't make it to the hootenanny).

Get ready to celebrate.  And even if you can't be there in person, you can celebrate our shared history in spirit – and get started on our shared future.  I hope this song – the final cut from Three Dog Night's second (and best) album, Suitable for Framing – will help put you in the right mood:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Kinks – "No More Looking Back" (1975)

But lately I've been going to

All the places that we once knew

[Note: I originally posted this last year, but am reposting it in anticipation of my 45th high school reunion, which is taking place this weekend.]

One of the highlights of my 40th high-school reunion in 2010 was a tour of my old high school with several dozen classmates.

Joplin High School (1958)

The building dated to 1958, but had been maintained so carefully that it looked as good as new.

Less than a year later, an EF-5 tornado struck Joplin.  It killed 161 people and destroyed the high school.

Joplin High School, after the 2011 tornado

Last October, Vice President Biden and Secretary of Education Duncan came to Joplin to dedicate the new state-of-the-art high school, which cost an estimated $121.5 million.

Vice President Biden, at the dedication
of the new Joplin High School

Biden is famous for sticking his foot in his mouth – the Washington Post has coined the word "gaffiness" to describe his proclivity for making verbal blunders. 

He uttered one of his most remarkable misstatements in Joplin, when he referred to the "161,000 brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, [and] grandparents lost" in the 2011 tornado.

He meant to say there were 161 deaths in Joplin, of course.  

I went to Joplin to see my parents shortly before Biden's visit.  The first chance I had, I walked from their house to new high school, which had opened for business at the beginning of the school year despite the fact that a lot of work remained to be done on the building and the grounds.

The new high school

I'm not sure what I was expecting to see, but what I saw was something very different.

The new gym and football practice field

The old high school, its parking lots and athletic fields, and the adjacent Franklin Technical Center covered 16 square blocks.  The new campus is even larger, and the building has been repositioned because the old building sat on a flood plain.  So things look very different than they did when I was a student.

Here's an aerial view of Joplin High School (which was known as Parkwood High School from 1968 until 1985) when it was brand new:

Here's what it looked like after the storm:

And here's an aerial view of the new campus:

(The top photo was taken looking to the south.  The middle photo and the bottom photo were taken looking to the north.)

Schoolboys in Disgrace, the 14th studio album by the Kinks, was released in 1975.  I bought it at the Harvard Square "Coop" (the nickname of the Harvard Cooperative Society) shortly after its release.

My favorite song on that album is "No More Looking Back," which is about the hold that someone from your past can continue to exert on you: 

And just when I think you're out of my head
I hear a song that you sang or see a book that you read
Then you're in every bar, you're in every café
You're driving every car, I see you everyday

But you're not really there 

'Cause you belong to yesterday

Ray Davies, who wrote this song and most of the Kinks' many great songs, was a keen observer of humans and all their foibles.

Ray Davies with ex-girlfriend Chrissie Hynde

But while Davies could be sharp and acerbic, he was at heart a deeply sentimental man.  (Just like 2 or 3 lines!)

"No More Looking Back" ends with these lines:

No more looking back
No more living in the past
Yesterday's gone, and that's a fact
Now there's no more looking back

Yesterday is gone – long gone.  That is a fact.  But I'll never stop looking back . . . I'll never stop living in the past.

When I do look back, I'm usually looking back to my high school years and the people I knew then.

College and law school came and went but didn't leave much of a mark, it seems –neither did most of my career experiences.

I don't have the old Joplin High School building to serve as a trigger for my high school memories.  But I don't think I need it.  I still have a lot of the people from those days – they may look different to you than they looked 40-odd years ago, but they don't look any different to me.

In Seize the Day, Saul Bellow wrote that "[t]he past is no good to us."  That may be true, but that doesn't mean we can ignore it.

We may try to follow Bellow's advice to focus on the present, and to "[s]eize the day."  But one's past is a powerful and seductive force.  It's a lot easier to reshape the past to our liking – the present often refuses to conform to our wishes.

All things considered, I think I like the past better.

Here's "No More Looking Back," which I think is an absolute masterpiece:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: