Social media has enabled us to stay in touch, at least since somebody made the effort to reconnect a few years ago. No matter how much we told each other how little we had changed over the years, we were all at least a little bit taken aback by the middle aged women who showed up to our brunch. Nevertheless, social media facilitated a seamless sequence of welcoming hugs. Though it had been more than thirty-five years for some of us, we all had at least some realistic expectations and were in little danger of being hauled off my New York's finest for inappropriately embracing some unsuspecting teenager.
There were six of us -- some going all the way back to elementary school together, but all of us intersecting, in varying degrees of closeness, in high school. After graduation, we all went our separate ways to decent schools, we all earned advanced degrees in something, we all got married and had children. Though we cannot believe how old we have become, we are still all a bit young for having graduated from high school in 1976. Back then, the New York City school system enriched its higher scoring students by skipping them right past eighth grade. The acceleration was not so much about enriched education as it was about getting us out of the dangerous junior highs as swiftly and safely as possible. We were not, by any means, all gifted. We were, for the most part, white kids from two-parent households, most of us with moms who would be waiting for us at home at three o'clock with milk and cookies.
New York City long ago abandoned the program that protected its smarter kids by releasing them into the larger world before they were fully cooked. These days, metal detectors and armed security guards have eliminated the need for developmentally unsound acceleration. We veterans of the skipped eighth grade struggled a bit because of our youth back then, and though we were never particularly impressed by our quickened pace we all secretly enjoy the reaction other people have to our seeming intellectual prowess. For an occasional self esteem boost, we have all, I am sure, kept the realities of the New York City school system to ourselves.
Our own children, for the most part, grew up in suburbia, insulated from kids who grow up without a mom in tennis clothes or a thoroughly vetted babysitter waiting for them at three o'clock with a plate of gluten-free cookies and a soy latte. Their schools had lock down procedures, mostly to keep outsiders out, and not to protect them from a large percentage of the student body. Administrators keep a close watch for the occasional troubled kid inside the building.
No matter how ready they are, chronologically, to go out in the world, our children venture out now into a place far more dangerous than the hallways of the New York City public schools in the seventies. I came out relatively unscathed, physically at least, having only suffered an occasional poke in the butt cheek with a compass needle or the lingering trauma of a menacing glance. But I didn't worry all that much about terror on public transportation or skyscrapers collapsing or threats of total annihilation by angry bands of faceless people in faraway and unhappy places.
Every generation has its challenges, I suppose, whether they are different but vaguely familiar or similar but vaguely different. The best we can hope for, sometimes, is to come out safely and relatively unscathed on the other side. It was great to see my old friends after so many years, great to see that they have all come out safely on the other side. There are ties that bind us from childhood, and hopefully those ties will keep us together both on social media and for an occasional brunch.
I felt a little shaky leaving the safety of that table to venture out, once again, into my own world. It was comforting to reconnect with old friends, survivors of a shared past, and survivors, I hope, of a shared albeit uncertain future.
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