It turns out you can go home again

This title may feel weird given how big of a deal I made of finding my home in New York City after years of searching. And it’s true that the last 20+ years in NYC have unlocked my favorite version of myself. I belong here. This is home.

But before the Bronx was home, suburban Cincinnati was, specifically the Sycamore school community in the Blue Ash and Montgomery areas. And last Saturday night was my 25-year high school reunion. So I have feelings, and I have thoughts.

I liked my time at Sycamore High School. There, I said it. I liked high school.

Sure, like any high school experience there was some shit. I was physically small, as late bloomer as it gets. I was one of only a handful of dark-skinned people. I was on the young side of the age cutoff so I got my driver’s license late.

More than anything, though, I was a double nerd - a math geek (I still am) and an orch dork (I wish I still was) rolled into one. Rough combo.

So you get the subtext, but just to make it text, I was mildly bullied here and there, both emotionally and physically. Not severely, and not regularly. But it happened.

Thankfully, it didn’t define my experience.

What did define my experience was friendship, fun, and a damn good education. What more can you ask for?

We were a large class, somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 students. That meant you had to find your people - you can’t know 499 people at a meaningful level of depth. You find your niche, your subset, your clique. “Sycamore, more like clique-a-more am I right?” That’s what the other high schools would say about us, but realistically, there’s no other way.

I found my people - math geeks and orch dorks. Prominently so.

Perhaps as a result of that, my graduating class of 2000 voted me as Most Likely to Succeed, a title that I honestly never felt I deserved.

I don’t think my classmates knew how barely held together all of this was, how teenage me was unproductively defiant and cynical, how I sabotaged my grades just for fun, how my parents were constantly stressed out that I wouldn’t have the discipline to make it in the real world.

Still, I’ll take the vote of confidence. It meant a lot then, and means more now. Proof that I had a blessed experience.

So now we have a 25-year reunion approaching. What does that even mean at this stage? What’s the point?

I went to the 5-year reunion. Haven’t been since. A lot has changed. Especially us.

We’re all in our 40s. We’ve settled into grooves. Many of us have left the area. Many of us are parents. We’ve got career drama. Lives to live.

We’ve probably kept in touch with a few folks that were in our niche. We may have followed a few more people on social media passively. Okay fine, a lot more people.

But traveling back to Cincinnati just for one night? That’s a lot to ask, pull me out of my groove. Pull everyone else out of theirs.

Then in May of this year, I met my friend Stan for breakfast in New York. I hadn’t seen him in 21 years. It was incredible - we picked up right where we left off. It meant so much, reconnecting with one of my childhood best friends. I wished we had done so sooner.

And that made it clear to me - the groove can wait. I have to go to the reunion.

Yes, I always open posts with “howdy”. What of it?

I fly into Cincinnati the night before the reunion. My parents are out of town, so it’s literally just me in their house. They moved after I graduated, so it’s not even my childhood house.

I meet up with my friends Mike, Phil, and Todd, from the math nerd niche. We go on a nostalgia drive. We visit our old schools. They’ve been completely transformed. We try to find each others’ childhood houses on muscle memory. We can still do it. We find the park where we played football every Friday.

We have lunch at Skyline Chili. We used to go every week. I can’t have red meat anymore, but luckily they have chicken chili. It’s just as good.

We have dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings. We used to go when it was called BW3s, or Buffalo Wild Wings & Weck. They don’t serve the little fry chips anymore. What the heck, that was their trademark!

Okay, enough time has been killed. It’s time to go to the reunion. Questions are racing through my head.

What should I wear? I go with a Cincinnati Reds t-shirt. Most of us will have that in common.

Do we hug? I am a big hugger now, but I don’t think I was back then. Hope it’s not weird. I’ll play this one by ear.

What should I drink? Beer is out, it gives me heartburn now. I guess I’ll go with my usual, prosecco, and hopefully no one thinks I’m a stuffy New Yorker.

Am I going to have the most gray hair? Let’s just assume yes.

I walk in. My first impression: everyone is so tall! That takes me back.

I start chatting with people. The conversations start out a little awkward.

How’s it going? Good, and you? Good. Wow, I haven’t seen you in … oh right, 25 years. So many of these conversations haven’t happened in 25 years, maybe longer.

The questions start getting a bit more specific. Where do you live? How do you like it? I have my “I love living in New York, even though you have less money and get less sleep” speech down pat. I have the backup speech, “I married a New Yorker, she wasn’t leaving”, on standby.

Sometimes we get into kid talk, or career talk, or generalized aging talk.

It starts feeling natural. Even with folks I barely knew back in the day. There’s a common bond, a common set of memories, a common upbringing that connects us. We were all there for the Columbine copycat scare, we were all there when our star football player was killed in a car accident, we were all there for the tornado that hit our high school and displaced several of us. It’s a foundation that can’t be taken away.

It can be a tough dance, though. Everyone has a mental checklist of who they need to talk to, and the whole night is on a timer. There's only so much we can do. It’s not anyone’s fault.

I’m struck that every one of these conversations should rightfully be a full meal, like the breakfast I had with Stan back in May. We don’t have that kind of time, but that’s what we need, now that we’re in our 40s and are past the bullshit.

I capture snippets from the night that I don’t want to forget:

The conversation about 11-year-old sons who love musical theater. We have to support them!

The conversation about marrying women from Flushing, Queens. My wife wouldn’t leave, his was willing to.

Talking to multiple folks about their paths back to Ohio after living somewhere else. Love to see it.

Comparing lanternfly extermination efforts between NYC and Virginia. Are they getting smarter?

Talking about the 7th-grade English teacher who showcased our bad essays in front of the whole class. A couple of us, including me, were picked multiple times. Ouch.

Focusing on our favorite teachers. All powerhouse women who brought their passion to pre-calculus, chemistry, and US history.

Detailed talks about parenthood, especially with folks who have three kids. Y’all are heroes, I can’t fathom it.

And honestly, the closing conversation - just how lucky we were growing up. It was a great place to be, with great people.

It is a great night. I don’t want it to end. Of course it does eventually, at 2:30 in the morning.

I get to my parents’ home. I’m still alone. I can’t sleep.

I start thinking about who wasn’t there. My best friend from when I was 9 years old, Ollie. He died in 2018 in a horrific accident.

I still have the first and last things Ollie ever wrote to me.

He was a true friend. We had lost touch. And I’m never going to be able to have one of these conversations - the ones I had all night - with him. Ever again.

I’m never going to be able to talk to him about the time when a classmate said to me, “at least I never got stuck in the toaster”, and he wasn’t having it. He fired back, on my behalf, and saved me. It was the first time I had experienced racism first hand, and it was immediately followed by my best friend having my back. And maybe Ollie is the reason that I was only mildly bullied the rest of my childhood.

I can’t tell him how much that meant to me. I can’t tell him how much he meant to me.

And that’s why you go to your 25-year high school reunion. So you can have the conversation - whether it’s recalling a formative moment like this, or just connecting with someone you kinda sorta knew back in the day.

You go not because it's realistic that folks you haven't seen in decades will suddenly be daily fixtures in your lives going forward, but rather because they were daily fixtures in your life at one point and made you who you are today. Every little moment - the class discussions, the raised hands, the group projects, practices, recitals, games, shared local and world events - you had together matters. They make up life.

12 hours after I left the bar in Cincinnati, I was back in the Bronx in my bed sleeping off all of the prosecco. I woke up at dinner time feeling like it was all a dream. It was so fleeting. And I’m worried my 43-year-old brain’s memory of it is already starting to fade.

I went to work like normal on Monday. Like nothing had changed. And maybe nothing had.

But I need more time back there. I need to make the moments count. I need to continue those conversations, and start new ones.

The next milestone is 5 years away. There will be fewer of us left when it hits. The curse of aging.

You either get to get old, or you don’t.

Luckily, there’s no one who instantly gets who you are when you’re old than someone who knew you when you were young. So no matter what the format is for my 30-year reunion, you can count on one thing.

I’ll be there.