Not too long after the Rockdale High School graduating Class of 1968 marched across the late Tiger Field and got our diplomas one pleasant May night, Sonny and Cher recorded a song called “The Beat Goes On.”
Now, Sonny is dead and Cher has become an embarrassing caricature of herself.
But for the Class of 68—my class, our class—the beat does indeed go on.
We held our 50th reunion the other night at Apache Pass. Fifty. Half-a-century. It hardly seems possible.
You know how it is with class reunions. At first you notice how much everyone has changed and then after about five minutes all that vanishes and you realize they haven’t changed at all.
Underneath the grey hair and the lined faces we’re still the same people we were trying to get Ruth Kirk to talk about her dogs instead of trigonometry or popping through a window in Dose Underwood’s mezzanine speech class for a stroll on the roof when she stepped out of the room.
Statute of limitations, please.
We’ve all battled life, of course. A couple of dozen of us have passed on. That’s what 50 years will do.
At a 10-year reunion you talk about your job and what you hope to accomplish, at 20 about what your kids are doing, at 50 about your doctors.
No kidding. One of my classmates dropped in out of the blue into my office a couple of weeks ago.
I had not seen him since the night we walked across Tiger Field in 1968. He lives in California now. Told me he’d had eight heart attacks.
He wasn’t at the reunion. He went back home and had No. 9. Amazingly, he is doing okay.
Classmate. What a word. In my job I deal with a lot of RHS classes, from the ones who will graduate next May to the 1925 cheerleader I once interviewed.
But only one class can be your own. And this one is mine.
I made a joke, that it took us a little longer to eat than the others at the restaurant because we had to keep passing around that one set of teeth.
They tolerate me. They’re my class.
We got caught up, or as caught up as possible in a few hours. It’s a realization of all reunions that after you walk across that field you never again share your lives like you did when you went to school together.
Unless you marry a classmate, and we’ve got that too, in the Class of ‘68.
But we proved something, in a way overcoming time.
The beat goes on.
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