Mixed Emotions/ I’m going to my high school reunion in two weeks.
September 19, 2021
I live in Massachusetts and I grew up, mostly, in Jersey.
But Facebook means that even though it’s been years, I know that Jim is a doctor and just got divorced. Laurie just had a grandchild, Emma is a professor and Allan is killing it in real estate.
Facebook means there is a place where everyone from Mountain Lakes shares memories, obits, updates and asks for help- tracking down an old friend, prayers during a battle with cancer, supporting a business, a page, or a cause.
This is the thing, and I’m being careful because the reunion is next week, and I love my hometown. I have connected with people on social media who I didn’t know when I saw them every damn day in the hallways at the high school or in the parking lot at Del’s Village.
When people reminisce about Mountain Lakes, many talk about the town, and their youth, as if it was a spectacular aberration.
Yes, we had parties, and people played guitar. Yes, the parties were really good parties, and the Stanfield’s were the coolest family in the world, they had a fire pit, an open door policy, and their kids were and are some of the best, smartest, funniest, and most amazing people I know, as well as you can know someone years after you shared a beer with them in their backyard.
The football team won all their games. We skated all winter and swam all summer. We went to the Market for sandwiches and Roma for pizza, and the pizza was better than any pizza I’ve had since, including New York. Well, maybe NY pizza was a little bit better, I’m in Massachusetts. I’m deprived.
Mr. Fox was a magical art teacher. I remember what Mrs. Smith taught me in freshman English. Mr. Hoke recited Shakespeare in a baritone that I can still hear. There were bluegrass festivals two towns over, New York City was a bus ride away, I wrote poems on scraps of paper and people read them and said nice things, even though I don’t think they were that good.
I have pictures of me smiling in a black tuxedo and fishnets during something called GAA. a competition between two teams, Blue and the Orange, that happened each spring after months of preparation. Each team would pick a story, and perform it, like a musical with the songs being used as vehicles for different dances and gymnastics. I was excited when I made the the modern dance team, even though I was picked as second substitute. There’s a photo in the yearbook, I had thick thighs and a huge smile. (I didn’t smile between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, or so I’m told, but in that picture, I’m grinning.
Yes, it was a magical wonderful time. But it wasn’t all bonfires and pancake breakfasts.
It was being picked last at gym. Starting to drink beer because it made me a little less shy. Getting crappy grades because I always forgot my textbooks in my rush to be on time to watch General Hospital, bumming cigarettes during lunch, people getting sick of me bumming cigarettes during lunch, getting pinkeye every summer from swimming at Island Beach, not eating much and lying on the floor to put on my jeans because I’d had cereal for breakfast. Smoking pot and feeling dumb. Taking up beer and Marlboro lights with the enthusiasm some reserved for field hockey and making the honor roll. Not ever having a clue about what was coming next or where I wanted to land.
These memories aren’t specific to being a young person in Mountain Lakes. They aren’t specific to being young in the 80’s, young and privileged, young and female.
They are just some of the things I think of when I look back.
For many people, in Mountain Lakes, NJ, and Milton, Massachusetts, our memories are where we like to linger because now is so damned hard.
We tell ourselves and our children about life back then, and it all sounds glorious.
But I’m pretty sure we leave stuff out, or forget the worst. I do.
Because the now, with the sore hip and the Covid, the retirement looming and the dental bills mounting- it’s nice to look back to anything other than what I see in the mirror before I’m ready to look.
I just wanted to say Mountain Lakes was a great place to grow up. So is Milton. So are a million other places.
But, it was’t perfect. For me anyway. I still can’t wait to go back.
It will be nice to walk down the Boulevard and stand on the beach by Birchwood Lake.
It will be good to see people in three dimensions, especially after this past year. It will be nice to look back on all of the hard parts, the stuff I’d never talk about on Facebook, or with anyone. For me, growing up was one quarter bliss and Bruce Springsteen and three quarters braces and diets, wondering what to say next and wishing I’d said something else or nothing at all.
I’m grown, and I’m in pretty good place right now.
It’ll be nice to take a weekend to remember how I got here.
Thanksgiving in Mountain Lakes, NJ (No, we aren’t going to be hanging out with Snookie)
November 27, 2013
Every year the kids and I make the journey from Massachusetts to Mountain Lakes, NJ for Thanksgiving. We go to visit my friend Amy, and her family.
Amy was one of my best friends growing up. She did her homework. She could always find her shoes. She went to college and then she finished college. She was, and is, very different from me.
Amy is now a high school math teacher at our old high school. Her husband, John is a lawyer, and her two kids are a little older than Colin and Kate. Taylor is a senior in high school and James is at college.
Somehow, and I have no idea how I pulled this one off, we have become part of the Amy and John’s extended family. She is the only grown up in the world capable of buying Colin a present he actually likes, and will spend hours on the phone discussing important matters of the day- is Katy old enough to trick or treat with three of her friends, no adult hiding behind bushes or lamp posts. The week of Thanksgiving is the only time, some years, we get to be friends face to face.
This year, we got in late Monday night. I thought the route from my house to her house was 84 to 684 to the Tappanzee to 287.* (That’s wrong, don’t try to take 684 to the Tappanzee Bridge. Unless you want to go on an adventure.) We spent about an hour driving around the Bronx while the navigation system told us to get on, and then off, 95 South).
So when we finally got to Amy’s house, I was a little wired. The kids fell into their beds, I hugged Amy good night, and I took Sophia, the Most Patient of Dogs, for a long over due walk.
It was 12:30 at night. I listened to David Gray on the headphones. The streets were shiny with rain, but the rain stopped right after we got outside. My thoughts turned to people I knew that I would not see this time home, or at any reunions down the road.
I didn’t know her well, but the first person I missed was Suzie Stanfield. She was the little sister of a good friend of mine. Her sentences always ended in exclamation points. She was indiscriminately kind to everyone and everything, from the idiot 4th grader that pulled her hair to the spider she found in the bathroom. I don’t think people always shared her enthusiasms. I don’t think people, in high school anyway, were always kind to her. She had a million freckles, a crooked smile and I am reminded of her voice when I listen to my daughter open gifts on Christmas morning. That was Suzie, a Christmas morning kind of girl.
I walk by Lloyd’s house. He lived there alone. He was a few years older than me. When I was in high school I spent a lot of time walking around the “Big Lake”. Most of the time, I would end up stopping by Lloyd’s for a drink. He always had the tv on, and he was always watching Mash. I must have a crush on him because I really can’t remember why I was always walking around the lake and I had already seen every episode of Mash. A lot of girls had crushes on him, he was a blonde surfer late 70’s Gary Cooper.
I still tell my kids about the bone marrow on toast Mrs Houlihan used to give my friend Onk for breakfast when she was little. Mrs. Houlihan. Maybe it’s strange, in this sentimental journey my thoughts would turn to one of best friend’s mothers’. But I would given anything last night to find myself inside Mrs. Houlihans’ kitchen. She looked like a little bird, small and quick. She would make us snacks, flutter her hands when she talked about her daughter, and she spoke with an Easter European accent that made her words sound sweet as pancakes. I was lucky to visit her kitchen and sit at her table.
Remembering people that I loved could have been a lonely business, but Sophia, my beautiful companion, kept me warm. And she would have served as the perfect alibi, I was wandering around wearing leopard flannel pants and a Patriot sweatshirt. It is an established code, dog walkers can wear anything, and all people will think is “what a nice woman, walking her dog when it’s clear she is so tired she is incapable of dressing herself.”
I would never go out for a late walk in my pajama bottoms back home.
But here I was in a strange place, that in some ways, I knew better than home, and it turned into a long, long walk.
I am a New Jersey girl, A Milton Mom, and a Complicated Woman with a Past. I had a lot to think about.
Happy Thanksgiving. And a huge thank you to the Harrington/Eveleth family. Thank you for inviting me home.
*84 to 287 to the Tappanzee Bridge, in case you’re wondering what the right sequence would have been. But don’t try it without confirming this information with a reliable navigation system.
julierichmond 