The lot

There was no special reason for us to be lumped together as such. We were a collective accident of demographics, time, and geography all standing together on paper covered risers in front of the stage during the spring of 1976. Singing "It's a small world after all" with yellow construction paper graduation hats propped on our heads we graduated from kindergarten.

Some of the girls had new dresses, easily spied by that long 70's look with a ruffle along the bottom. Most of us wore something probably a bit older, maybe a hand-me-down from an older sister. Kids grow so fast. And trips to the mall for something new just weren't on the map back then. The dresses are nice, but they have the high high hemlines of a few years earlier. My dress was older still, from before the hemlines went up in the first place. But I loved it. It doesn't come out so well in the photo, but I remember it was a blue chiffon with little pink flowers sprinkled all over it. This was before the years of being teased for wearing clothing about 10 years out of date and it didn't yet occur to me to despise how mom dressed me. Although, now I look at these pictures and realize my dress was perfectly fine. And we did much better than those plaid pants that all the boys wore. (WHAT were they thinking?) I look at the mix of patterns in the fabrics and see the explanation for why I insist on only wearing solids, today.

Some of the kids in this bunch would grow up and thin out. Some wouldn't grow too much taller than they were here. There in the front row is Dan, the kid who loved orange (which he pronounced "ah-nj") and would always hog the orange paint during finger painting. He also stole my pencil case (which, ironically, was orange). Oh look, he's wearing an orange shirt with those blue plaid pants. Yeah, he disappeared after 3rd grade. Behind him stands Justin. I could never figure out how he always managed to do things wrong like piss off the teacher or get bad grades. Now it occurs to me, he was dumb. Right in front of me is Fred, who would go on to be our class valedictorian and who at that age was probably already doing trigonometry in his head.

Next to us stands Miss Clear, the most breathtakingly ignorant teacher I have ever suffered in my entire life with the possible exception of Carol Bankherd. First of all, with a poochie belly like that she should have known better than to wear those diagonal stripes (hey, what good is unearthing the family photographic coprolites if you can't be catty about fashion). She put all of the tall kids on the front risers so they neatly block everyone else. And, to boot, she always called me "Carolyn". Thus began the battle of a lifetime. That's not my name.

All kindergarten just seemed like some weird ideas for playing. I had no idea at the time the amount of stress these people were under to quickly assess us and put us into proper boxes of like-level-intelligence kids. I'm convinced they had me all wrong. How dare they assess me by their own boringness?

Well, it's about 32 years after kindergarten graduation and 20 years after high school. Tomorrow I get on a plane to go see what happened, and what's left, of the lot of us. I think it was a bad idea to attend this shindig. They'd do just fine without me, I'm sure. And I'd do just fine without a trip back to "my roots". Roots? please! Roots are something to be ripped up by or something to color correct once a month. I'm told I'll have a chance to gloat, but if that's supposed to be the carrot, I'm not biting.

I should be packed. I haven't started. I'm just getting cold feet on the verge of going back there and waiting for some force to come up from behind and make me jump in.