Our dresses were sparkling, chosen for the bling-image we wanted to project, while we secretly celebrated the fact that we were still alive 30 years after graduating from High School. We wore silver high-heels and carried gold bags. Some of us, out of habit, wore an excessive amount of makeup.
We pumped the arms of boys who were now a bit paunchy and had wallets full of children (and a few grandchildren, too). We misapplied "boy" in this case.
We approached perfect strangers with the opener, "do I know you?" which was frequently wrong, and we thought we actually hadn't changed all that much ourselves. For the week leading up to the event we imagined a re-enactment similar to the ones conducted by Civil War enthusiasts, a re-creation of battlefield surges and losses with other people in similar uniforms. These field exercises had dogged us even into our late forties: we were not popular enough, we did not have the coolest friends, we didn't have the nerve to approach whoever was necessary for a happy existence. We died a social death.
It was silly but it was part of memory. A telescoping memory narrows our view, as if we are a general surveying the field during the re-enactment from a great temporal distance.
