charlie stole this bmx bike from somewhere (he is a doctor or nearly a doctor) and i don't place a lot of value in partying hard (see my story about jcb, re: pleasure and happiness), but i had had all this purple malt-energy beverage called four-max and sometimes it is fun to go a little crazy so i was chasing charlie up and down the parking lot in a dead sprint taking photographs as he rode this bike around and i remember thinking "i feel insane" and "this is unsustainable" (which is funny, because the theme of our reunion was sustainability). and if you were there i probably announced to you that i felt insane and there was good reason for that. energy drinks and alcohol are a bad combination for me and luckily the worst that happened last weekend was i fell off a golf cart that i was dancing on into the corner of a brick wall and got a little cut up, but one time four years ago (the last time i mixed energy drinks and alcohol) i had all this red bull and vodka and i was at a party and i realized that i had to get out of there so i excused myself to the bathroom which was on the second floor. once i got upstairs i started to formulate plans for my escape, which was not actually that difficult, because there was this balcony over the backyard and obviously all i had to do was climb down the balcony and hop the fence into the alley and walk home. but that wasn't how it worked out because i stepped over the guardrail and started to walk my way down the pillar that ran from the second story down to the ground and it detached from the balcony, pulled right out, and i am not sure how long i held on, but it wasn't very long and i found myself on the concrete, 15 ft. below where i thought i should be and goddamnit, my elbow hurt, but goddamnit that was funny. until i woke up the next day and wondered how i didn't hit my head and if anyone would have found me if i had. i don't think so.
but we were talking about reunion and it was one of the best times i've had in a long time or maybe ever, because after chasing charlie and after the golf cart and the pants-off dance-off and after meeting all these great people, who i didn't really know at school, two of my best friends and two other newer friends who happened to be pretty girls and i went down to the canon river at like 4 in the morning and went for a swim and the sun was starting to come up and rosali didn't go in the water, because she was afraid of drowning and maybe for good reason. and it was the summer solstice and then we went to perkins for breakfast at 5:30 and this waiter named "J" brought us plates of food that we weren't that hungry for and everything was hilarious. after breakfast we drove out to canon falls where there was a lake and on the way there was this grass landing strip with all these people getting ready to take their small planes out for the day and we did yoga on the dock and some of us napped and some fishermen set off from the boat ramp. and i guess there was no real fitting way to end our time together, because we just sort of drifted away once we were back on campus and how do you say goodbye after something like that? it was just so amazing. and i stayed up the rest of the solstice (more or less) and went to a second breakfast with president oden, but i was even less hungry then than i was the first time and then i bade farewell to everyone i saw and to carleton college and went up to st. paul to watch a baseball game. (and that was fun too, but more in the expected fun kind of way). it was the kind of experience that can happen only once in a great while.
now it's not like i wasn't expecting to have fun, because i was, but i was convinced that i was in touch with the majority of people that i wanted to be in touch with and reunion maybe would be an opportunity for us all to be in the same place together, but probably not anything more (and i'm not saying that's not a lot).
(and a brief aside here, why are there so many double negatives in that last sentence?)
anyway, we had our cliques (or social groups or friends or whatever) in college and i expected the same sort of structure to persist ad infinitum. but the miracle of reunion was that something, maybe distance, separation or real life made us realize that we all actually had a lot more in common with each other than any of us ever suspected, and in realizing this, we were freed of our social constraints. we were suddenly free to engage and connect with people outside our groups of friends. now that doesn't sound miraculous, or even noteworthy necessarily, but what if that lesson could be applied to societies greater than college classes? what if we could suddenly see everything we had in common with everyone; our shared goals, as opposed to our disagreements?
and no one likes to be told how something is, least of all me (and especially not when it is me doing the telling-how-something-is),
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