Why, I wondered, would anyone accept, of his or her own free will, an invitation to a seventy-year high school reunion? A seventy-year reunion! If the people invited were to ask my opinion, I would urge them to politely decline. I’d say, “Okay, you had a great time at the fifty-year reunion, I get that, but why push your luck? Truly, do not go, unless you have a morbid sense of humor. Do you need to see the captain of the football team — now sixty pounds heavier and gripping a walker — shuffling his feet oh-so-slowly through the doorway? Or do you long to greet the Homecoming Queen whose face now looks like a National Geographic relief map? And do you really want to experience the agony, once again, of listening to a half-hour monologue from the former president of the Debate Club on the always-fascinating topic of U.S. foreign policy toward Yugoslavia during the Truman administration?”
I had, in fact, been ignoring serial invitations to my own Woodrow Wilson High School seventy-year reunion until, two days before the event, I was shamed into registering. A few out-of-town classmates emailed or telephoned me to point out that I lived only four miles from the reunion venue — La Ferme, a popular French restaurant in Chevy Chase — and wasn’t it my duty to show up and report back to them since they lived far away and couldn’t travel, etc., etc. So, I went. Nonetheless, though I was seated at a table with four classmates, I spent most of the afternoon in a reverie, largely oblivious to the cheesy speeches and the ambient chatter in the room. I was instead absorbed in the retrieval of some sweet, twenty-year-old memories — of the Class of 54’s wonderful fifty-year reunion. Then, the football captain and the Homecoming Queen looked great! And everyone else at the reunion looked great, too. Fifty years out and we were all in our prime, weren’t we? I cherished my memories of that weekend.
The fifty-year reunion had encompassed an entire weekend, I remembered, beginning with a barbecue supper on Friday and ending with a brunch and tour of the newly renovated high school building on Sunday. The highlight of the weekend was the Saturday evening cocktail hour and dinner, held at the Kenwood Country Club. I arrived at the country club a little late that evening, and I found the parking lot to be nearly full. It pleased me to see that the parked cars were mostly mid-sized SUVs or aging Volvos like mine, unpretentious cars, utilitarian cars, none of them gas guzzlers. Good, I reckoned, it’s good to know that we’re fifty years out of high school but still socially conscious. Even though I did spot, here and there, the occasional Porsche or Lexus or Cadillac Escalade. One car in particular attracted my attention — a Lexus SC convertible — because of its New York license plate. Whose car might that be? Oh, I know, I’ll bet it’s Martin’s. He lives in New York, doesn’t he, and he always comes to these reunions. I really need to give him a hard time about his damn gas-guzzling Lexus.
I can recall pausing briefly, as I walked along the path from the parking lot to the clubhouse, to listen to the animated conversation and waves of laughter that were rippling outward through the opened French door of the ballroom. It was a sound I had been hoping to hear, the sound of a joyful group of people, and I happily anticipated joining the group. Was that Martin’s deep, stentorian voice that I heard, providing a bass continuo below the mixed chorus of voices? Probably not, though it could be. Martin did have a deep voice, I remembered, but so did other guys in the class. Anyway, I was looking forward to meeting up with Martin.
Upon arriving at the registration desk, I was immediately enveloped in the embrace of Barbara Harling Brown, our class-secretary-for-life, who was in charge of the reunion committee. Barbara was, in fact, pretty much the whole of the committee, having taken upon herself, since graduation, the sole responsibility for organizing a reunion every ten years. WW ’54 seemed to be her main raison d’etre. She not only planned these events meticulously but passed the intervening years tracking down every classmate who was MIA and, whenever the need arose, circulating an obit of the recently departed to the surviving members of the class.
“Oh, Simon, how are you? Where have you been?” A flurry of Barbara’s kisses followed, some connecting, others not. “I’m excited to see you, haven’t seen you in ages! It’s so great that you could make it to the reunion!”
In ages? I guessed that Barbara measured “ages” by the intervals between reunions. The last time I had seen her was at the forty-year reunion, so I figured that ten years must constitute an “age” for Barbara. And she’s excited to see me? We both live in Bethesda, don’t we, yet ten years can pass during which we don’t have any contact with one another. I suppose it just takes ten years for the excitement to build, huh, Barbara?
“Great to see you, too, Barbara. And how is Harry?” I congratulated myself for remembering that Barbara’s husband was named Harry.
“Oh, he had a heart attack last year, you know, but he’s doing okay. He’s inside the ballroom and he’d love to chat with you.”
Barbara located my badge and pinned it on my lapel. There was my name in all-caps, “SIMON WEST,” and below it, in smaller print, “WW Class of 1954.” Above my name was a photo of a person who looked vaguely familiar to me, a photo of my sixteen-year-old self. Parting from Barbara at the registration desk, I insinuated myself into the crowded ballroom, which accommodated a hundred and seventy-five of my fellow alumni – more than half the graduating class – along with a hundred or more spouses and significant others. I snatched a flute of champagne from the tray of a circulating waiter, wandered through the crowd and soon spotted Martin Kreel, who was engaged in conversation with Bernie, a mutual friend.
The three of us, I reflected –Martin, Bernie and myself – represent three-fourths of the physician cohort that emerged from the class of WW ‘ 54. I came over to greet the two of them, but Martin paused before returning my greeting, stealing a glance at my badge and scanning the boldly printed name SIMON WEST and the vintage picture above. Of course, many others at the reunions were resorting to the same tactic when they greeted one another, scrutinizing the name and photo on someone’s badge before entering into a conversation. But that was excusable. Who but a close friend could bump into someone and connect his/her name to a face that was – compared to the photo on the badge – fifty years past its expiration date?
“Well, hello Simon! How are you, what have you been up to?” Marin hesitated to say much more, because he was searching his memory for some connection to me.
“Not much, Martin. Still practicing neurology. And still reading Cicero and Caesar’s Gallic Wars.”
Now Martin made the connection. “Right! We were together in Mrs. Murphy’s twelfth-grade Latin class, weren’t we? I remember that class very well.”
He did remember — but not very well. The teacher was addressed as Dr. Murphy by her students, not as Mrs. Murphy, and Martin and I had actually been together in her classes for all three years of high school.
“Tell me, Simon, are you serious, do you still read Latin?”
Is he putting me on, I wondered, or is he really that gullible? Martin never had much of a sense of humor, as best I could recall. I was tempted to answer the question affirmatively, just to impress Martin, but I thought better of it. “No, Martin, I was just fantasizing. I actually hated Latin.”
After exchanging a few more banalities with Martin and Bernie, I declared myself in need of a drink and set out for the bar. From there, with a martini firmly in my grasp, I navigated through the crowd and emerged onto the veranda just outside the ballroom. As I stood there in solitude, gazing upon the eighteenth green and the undulating fairways beyond — which seemed to stretch all the way to the setting sun — my thoughts drifted back to Dr. Murphy’s twelfth-grade classroom. Yes, I reflected, I had hated Latin. But I always got A’s in Latin, and that was because my mother – who had been a Latin teacher before she re-invented herself as a real estate agent – drilled me and drilled me and made sure I got A’s. Mario of course got A’s in every course. Anything less would have frustrated his ambition of becoming class valedictorian, which he considered his destiny, his ticket to Harvard Medical School.
Only six senior students had registered for Advanced Latin that semester, including Martin and myself, so Dr. Murphy placed everyone in the first two rows, at adjacent desks. Martin was seated to my right, in the second row. One day, during a midterm exam, Dr. Murphy began to cough and excused herself from the classroom briefly in order to find a drink of water. At that moment, Martin – to my utter astonishment – leaned across the narrow aisle separating our desks and peeked at my exam paper, copying my answer to one of the questions. Dr. Murphy returned to the classroom a half-minute later.
My astonishment at Martin’s transgression in Dr. Murphy’s classroom was genuine, compounded of disbelief, disgust and perverted pride. (The perverted pride resulted from my realization that Martin, the smartest kid in school, had more confidence in my answer than in his own.) But, fifty years later, while I was standing on the clubhouse veranda, gazing upon the crepuscular landscape and twilit clouds, I reckoned that cheating actually does pay. Martin did get his A in Advanced Latin that last semester and did become class valedictorian. And he did get admitted to Harvard Med, graduating with an MD/PhD and becoming a professor at the Rockefeller Institute. And, just think, that’s the same guy who drives a Lexus SC convertible, a damn gas-guzzling Lexus.
Now, in the dining room of La Ferme, twenty years after the fifty-year reunion, I found himself at yet another WW ’54 reunion — this time against my better judgement. Who needed this seventy-year reunion? I was seated amongst a small collection of classmates whom I scarcely knew. My close friends from high school had all passed. What am I doing here? I mused, this is just totally anti-climactic. I paid little attention to the conversation at my table or to the sententious speeches that were delivered by Barbara and others during and following the luncheon. I was roused from my reveries by the melody of “Sons of Wilson,” the school alma mater, being played on a keyboard. The people around me were standing, so I stood, too, and half-heartedly joined the chorus — although I, and probably most of my classmates, could recall only a few snatches of the lyrics. (Barbara, our class-secretary-for-life, of course remembered every word of the lyrics and didn’t miss a beat.)
I should have expected the seventy-year reunion to be morbid. I shouldn’t have succumbed to my friends’ pleas that I attend, just so I could serve as their proxy. Only eighteen classmates – out of the original three hundred and thirty – had showed up for the reunion. The Homecoming Queen had planned to come, but a week prior she suffered a fall and broke her hip. Martin, I knew, had died several years ago. My old friend Bernie, whom I hadn’t seen in several years, did attend, accompanied by his wife, but Bernie did not have any recollection of our having talked at the fifty-year reunion. In fact, he did not even recall having attended the fifty-year reunion. It quickly dawned upon me that Bernie had a significant memory problem.
Everyone at the reunion looked very old and fragile. It was dispiriting. Except for the lunch itself, which had been quite palatable, nothing about the reunion was enjoyable. Nostalgia hadn’t worked this time. I said my goodbyes and departed the restaurant soon after dessert – a delicious Peach Melba – was served and Barbara delivered her closing remarks. I did not, when I returned home, have any desire to reflect on bygone times at Wilson High or on past reunions. I knew I had attended one reunion too many.
So, that was it. Goodbye, Wilson High, and thanks for the memories (some memories, anyway.) No more reunions, no more classmates nagging my conscience, no more vivid reminders of the physical and mental detrition wreaked by time. But…what about Barbara, our class-secretary-for-life? Won’t she – five years from now – be announcing the diamond anniversary of the Woodrow Wilson H.S. Class of 1954? I’m sure that Barbara will still be around in 2029. She has to be alive, if for no other reason than she’s the only one in the class who still remembers all the lyrics to “Sons of Wilson.” And suppose, just suppose, that I’m the only other member of the class still alive five years down the road. I know that Barbara will contact me and insist that we have lunch together at La Ferme to celebrate the class of ‘54’s diamond anniversary. What will I say to her, how could I deny Barbata her precious reunion, probably her last reunion? Would I muster the courage to say “no”?
I don’t think I’ll be able to deny Barbara, and I’m already resigned to joining her for another lunch at La Ferme five years from now. At least that restaurant does, as I recall, serve a delicious Peach Melba.
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Elliot Wilner is a retired neurologist, living in Bethesda, MD. In retirement, he has enjoyed — with his wife’s indulgence — a long-deferred dalliance with creative writing. Several of his stories, essays and poems have appeared in literary magazines and other periodicals.
© 2025, Elliot Wilner
Halfway Down the Stairs 