But Finals Were Just Last Month!

Hitting the message playback button only to have a female voice identify you, her name and begin speaking in complete sentences, my stomach instantly contracted to the size of a walnut and ran to hide behind my liver.

There are awful, terrible, horrible phone calls you sometimes get in life and this was one of them. I had expected a truncated robo-voice urging me to sell my mortgage out like a herd of sheep in October or call right now to earn double the points of this amazing offer or participate this very instant in a town hall discussion taking place in Iowa.

Instead she asked for C. Autistic Bonet, introduced herself and said she had gone to high school with C. Autistic and was I he?

The fact that I was and she had found me (generic area code and all) on the first try made me re-think recent musings of giving up my day job to go back to being a spy.

Then I panicked. I don't know about you, but my high school generation was pre-prophylactic wrapped hand-holding. We took chances, sometimes foolish ones that nevertheless were really smokin' at the time, with our selves and other selves that you'd cut lawns for a month for to afford dinner money, con your way into a Saturday night with the car and after a warm glass or two of Charred O'Nay snuggle up to in the back of the car in a parking lot you'd scoped out with some buddies.

In other words, you did something that wasn't just youthful exuberance and coming of age, you got lucky in the back seat.

So for some woman to announce that she had gone to high school with me made me wonder if a one time back seat party was now out there somewhere debating a vasectomy, giving up on Rogaine and mortgaging his house for a second time. See, it was that long ago that I was in high school.

Now they're having a reunion, and I'm invited!

The woman (whom I don't remember, then or now) went on to announce that the-number so large it borders on obscene-year reunion of the old place is coming up in October.

Hoo-boy. I can't wait to see people I barely knew then and know even less now. Talk about all the good old times we never had and compare expanding waistlines and receding hairlines.

You can probably guess I'm not going. But to be honest, there's a reason I'm not going. I really don't know these people, we really didn't have a lot of good times together and I'm not going to make any shit up that we did. I went to 3 1/2 years of high school in a different town, state, hell, country than my graduating class. I showed up in January, looked forward to graduating in June then got held back a year because some administrator couldn't fathom how my old school considered eleventh grade the end of high school. Hint: We actually had a curricula that didn't involve study hall or self-esteem as legitimate periods. So after almost eleven years with kids I knew, grew up with, did actually have weird shit, life changing, remember forever experiences with I transferred and graduated with a class of strangers.

I won't be going back to reminsce eighteen months that happened -number so large it borders on obscene- years ago.

There was another reunion. It happened a few years ago and it was my actual high school class getting together after -a number that was just dirty- years.

I didn't make it. I was distracted. Life was kind of falling apart at the time and I wasn't going to recount that over white wine and cocktails.

Pity I didn't. Out of that maelstrom a few years ago came a few pretty good friendships and bonds that still hold today even though we don't see each other a whole lot and emails have dropped off. I still think of you all.

A lot.

In a year or two, our class will have graduated -a number so large it affronts God- years ago and I'm hoping there's a reunion. Count me in. Maybe I'll get my back seat boogie consequence to drive me up in the Porsche he can't afford.

Bunny on.