THE LAST REUNION, PART I: MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

Seeing in our hometown newspaper the obituary of Paula, my classmate from fifth grade through high school, reminded me of the last time I saw her, at our 60-year class reunion, and all the confusion our last conversation produced. Reflecting on it took far too many words for one column, so here is the first in a four-part series.

THE LAST REUNION, PART I: MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED

I saw Paula’s obit in the hometown newspaper last week. She was voted The Girl Most Likely to Succeed in our high school graduating class. She fulfilled that prediction of our classmates, mostly. There were two glitches. She was not successful in marriage, and she was not successful in empathy.

The marriage was not a disaster. She and Jack were wed for 40 years. But, as she said in a group chat at one of our every-five-years class reunions, “We had lived parallel lives for so long it just didn’t seem necessary to live in the same house anymore.” The marriage did produce a daughter, though, who in turn produced grandchildren, so that when Paula retired from her community college English teaching position, she moved out east to be near her family.

Paula was elegant. Old friend Mary McDermott Shidler, the theologian, defined elegance as “beauty plus organization.” That was Paula. Tall and slender, even at 78, the age we all were at our final high school class reunion. She looked then just like she did in high school. Pleasant, just a little bit reserved, lovely smile, clothes exactly right for her slender figure. Her elegance was more the Hoosier girl type than the New York girl type, but real.

She was smart. Not top of the class. Nobody could outdo James Burch and Russell Riddle. In grades, she and I tied for 12^th in our class of 62, which was appropriate, since I was voted Boy Most Likely to Succeed.

Those Likely to Succeed expectations linked us at class reunions. We always spent some time together, talking over old times. We never talked politics, though, or social policies. That is not what class reunions are for.

I had no idea about the politics of anyone in the class, because we had never talked about such as teens, either. We were interested in sports and cars and clothes and music and dates. Those were more than enough to keep us busy. Besides, we were part of “the silent generation,” the Eisenhower years.

We said personal bittersweet good-byes as our 60-year reunion ended, knowing that those of us who were not local would never see one another again, for we had decided that this reunion was the last one. We were going out the door, just Paula and me, when, totally out of nowhere, she brought up her great distaste for President Obama. “We never would have elected him,” she said, “if the media had told us the truth about him.” [1]

“Well, you know,” I said to Paula, treading carefully, because I had the impression that I was in a mine field that had existed over 60 years and I didn’t even know it was there, “Obama was elected twice.”

Her pleasant face turned puzzled. “Yes,” she said, “I never did understand that.”

This was an elegant woman. Most Likely to Succeed. Two college degrees. A 40-year English teacher. An active, life-long Methodist. I knew she wasn’t stupid.

But understanding why he was elected twice was not difficult. A majority of voters learned the truth about him in his first term in office and decided they wanted him as president for a second term. That’s pretty simple, and “the media” had nothing to do with it. Claiming not to understand that was being willfully ignorant.

I was so disappointed. I had known and liked this woman for almost 70 years, but I did not know her nearly as well as I thought I did. Life is always going to bring disappointments, and perhaps the people we think we know best are the ones who disappoint us most, when they turn out to be someone other than who we thought they were.

More about disappointment in the next column.

John Robert McFarland