My 40th High School Reunion

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

One of my favorite moments during my 40th high school reunion this weekend was so flickeringly brief that I doubt the other parties even remember it now. Before I continue, a note: the one mandatory item at 40-year reunions is nametags for everyone. Even if we more or less look like ourselves, it is now forty years later, and most of us are older than our parents were when we were in high school. At the reception that evening, I noticed that at first most of us pretended to not look at the nametags but after a half-hour all pretense was gone and I saw many of us walk up to a new conversation partner, lean forward, squint, and say, “Oh! Mark!” or whichever name.

My favorite moment came during the dinner/dance party in a club near our old school, Spackenkill High School (seen above), when the eighty or ninety of us were in full churn, combining and recombining into old cliques and new conversations (to my classmates’ credit, there were more new conversations than old cliques). With the help of a classmate, I’d found a bottle of water for dinner. It is possible that I owe this friend money for the water, as it came from the bar, and my actions turned it into a free bottle: I took it, said thanks, and headed back to my table, as oblivious as I was when I was fifteen. As I walked with the bottle past a table with two women at it, they each said, “Hi, Mark,” without looking up from their close conversation.

Neither ignored nor invited, I continued to my seat, and reflected that this could have been a moment in our school cafeteria in 1983 as easily as what it was now in 2026: two classmates acknowledging me without the need to invite me into their deep conversation. It felt like belonging somewhere, it felt like I belonged, which I never felt when I was a teenager, except maybe on stage.

Like an oblivious fifteen-year-old, when this thought came to me I wanted to go over to their table and share it with the two women, which would have both interrupted their moment and sundered my quiet feeling of belonging. I didn’t go anywhere. There was food in front of me that was far superior to high school cafeteria food.
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‘Coming into leaf’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
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When I entered her car last Wednesday morning, my friend’s greeting was, “What a beautiful day.” This is not always her greeting, not always the first thing I hear her say when I see her on Wednesdays, so from inside my current depression I stammered, “You … you mean the sunniness?”

We backed out into the road. It was indeed a sunny morning. “Yeah, I think we’re finally past the snow,” she added.

As you and your shovel may know, it was indeed a snowy winter this December and January and February and March in New Paltz, a prankster’s winter that gave us the biggest snowstorm in a couple years followed by a few unseasonably warm days followed by the biggest snowstorm in a decade and a week of below-zero nights. Small snowstorms then punctuated March. My friend’s tentative response (“I think we’re finally past the snow”) was the sensible one. More snow could yet arrive.

I needed that greeting, though. It was a sunny morning, and I had not yet noticed it.
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‘Do People Your Age …?’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

On the eve of 57, no less.

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I’ve strolled past enough of life’s temporal landmarks—birthdays that end in zero or five, or the first time someone called me “sir,” or when I turned 28 and AARP “free gift” mailers started to arrive—that I did not think one could jump out of an alley and surprise me, but it happened. And, yes, “surprised” is a euphemism for “enraged.”

Okay, “enraged” is an exaggeration. I did NOT hit the other person, nor did I try to.

Please allow me to set the scene for you: I am 56. (This is all anyone needs to know, right?)
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