Sept. 12, 2015
Chesterfield Christian Spirtualist Camp, Spirit Fest
The grounds outside this modest 1930’s hotel room buzz with conversations, children’s shrieks of fun. Cars sit under trees, the parking lots filled. It’s Spirit Fest. Reiki healers, tarot card readers, clairvoyants, crystal manipulators and the amazing Tomstones (wielded, as you might guess, by a guy named Tom) are all available at card table size booths or tented places outside. It’s $5 to get in, but I’m staying in the hotel so I got in for free with a promise that if I decided to attend, I’d pay $5.
At 10:00 am this morning reunion events continued with coffee and donuts at the Alexandria Historical Society. We were all a little more comfortable, more classmates recognized, or cadged from people we did remember. The Alexandria Historical Society has a lot of stuff. A lot. So it was interesting to put this exercise in yesterday inside a building devoted to the past.
Henry Benefield and I talked. His family ran the small grocery store nearest the junior high of my day. We often gathered there to buy candy, long paper strips of sugary, colorful dots, small waxy bottles filled with a sweet liquid, jawbreakers. Henry lives to fish. He’s posted some good sized catches on Facebook.
Steve Galloway told me about his daughter and the planning, then execution she put into a recent trip to England and Scotland. He worked at a golf course most recently, but quite after “too many drunks and people expecting me to know everything.” He had worked as an engineer before that.
Leonard Dockery, apparently quite rich now, lives in Tennessee with his family and his daughters. “She gets the house.” Leonard was most memorable to me for a dive he took off a second story balcony when shot while we were playing army. He was a good friend back in the day.
My best friend, Ronnie Montgomery, with whom I have lost contact, will not come. Toni Fox, who seems to know everyone, did not know why. Neither will Cathy Thomas be back.
Not sure what makes a class reunion attract some and repel others. Certainly it has something to do with the sort of feeling tone high school retains, but that’s not all of it. Some of it, I suppose, is self-esteem. Perhaps there are those not interested in the long ago at all, living their lives forward. Others may have a particular remembered slight or embarassing incident, imagining that moment is all others recall.
I go back out of curiosity about my past. Since I’ve been away from town for now well over 45 years, it’s easy to have the Alexandria days become unmoored. They can seem almost like a fantasy, a period of my life lived in a place I’d never really been. And, in a sense, that’s true.
A common refrain at this reunion is that the town we knew is gone, vanished with those automobile jobs in the 1970’s. “A mausolem.” “A ghost town.” “Sad.”
The Alexandria of my youth had no shuttered stores, no retail blocks filled with dollar stores and antique consignment shops. We had Bailey’s and Rexall pharmacies. There was both Ferman’s, a high quality women’s store, and Baumgartner’s for men. Furniture stores, dime stores, two movie theaters, The Alex and The Town. We even had, a town of around 5,000, a daily newspaper, the Alexandria Times-Tribune where dad worked. I delivered it on several different paper routes.
This Alexandria, now long sunk under waves of global economic change, was a vibrant small town. It had its own economy and a healthy sense of identity that we all shared, not knowing it was a temporally bounded thing, just waiting for Toyota and Volkswagen to destroy. Alexandria teaches the impermanence of life as surely as Ephesus, Angkor and the Roman Forum.
Tonight is the big event, a feed with 90 from our class scheduled to attend. It will be at Norwood lanes, a bowling alley and pool hall, where I learned the art of the bank shot and how to avoid a gutter ball. Another time for reconnecting.
