Time and again I planned to go to a Middlebury Reunion, bought a plane ticket and, as the time drew near, groaned. Vermont was so far from my home in Colorado. I was busy, beleaguered. It would be so much easier not to go.
At our 5th, our class was first into the chapel for Convocation. Macy Lawrence and I sat side-by-side up in the gallery. As other classes rolled in, I saw our human cohort age before my eyes. At the end, to huge applause, entered the oldest alums, proud and smiling, and I understood us as part of the continuum.
Over the decades I was also sometimes abashed before Reunion: Who would I talk to, sit with? But by the end of the weekend, I was always glad to have gone. I also realized I was spending as much time talking to people I hadn’t known as with my friend group.
At our 10th, at Bread Loaf, I roomed with my friend Emily Langlie and her friends Laura Sheetz Bryan and Julie Stabler Hull, whom I got to know. Later I had a long exchange with Julie, who had donated a kidney to a friend’s sister. Julie told me, “It was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.”
Last summer I arrived for our 45th in blinding rain and hurried, drenched, into registration, disoriented by the sight of the milling crowds below the entrance. Someone called my name. It was Joan O’Brien from our class, who beckoned me over to her crew. Joan was the first of many to say she was sorry about what had happened in my life: four months earlier I’d been laid o!, with my team, from a dream job at Outside magazine. I had recently published an essay in the Aspen Daily News called “Going to Reunions When Things Aren’t Going Well.” The day it appeared, I’d had a sheepish moment, thinking, Why’d I have to tell everybody? Still, I was glad. It was the truth, I’d moved on, and I’ve learned that ill as well as good fortune can connect you to others.
Our classmates mobbed a long table in good old Proctor, waving others over, and then filed outside for an important commemoration of our 30 lost. At our 10th I had hiked the Snowbowl with Barbara Banks, at our 35th stayed up late with her—the last significant amount of time we’d spend before her death to cancer.
That first night, friends talked about going to hear the band at the sports center. While some years I had danced hard, gone hard, a loud party was the last place I wanted to be. Yet it led to a weekend highlight.
Rich Silton waved cheerfully as Karen Eckrich Tyler and I walked in. In college Rich had been head of the Middlebury College Activities Board (MCAB), a position heralding corporate greatness, and I’d known him through maybe one short, polite conversation. Now, as we chatted, he asked about an old roommate, saying, “She was the really wealthy one, right?”
I said, “Maybe.” I wasn’t sure.
He said, “I was a poor kid. We knew who the rich kids were.”
Rich had been so polished and self-possessed in college I’d unthinkingly assumed a fancy background. Later I emailed him that I appreciated his candor that night just as much as the hilarious story he told the next, of hiding contraband dorm fridges from administrators.
He replied: “I was a public school kid with four brothers, at first intimidated by the private school kids. ‘Where’d you prep?’ ‘Huh?’”
He’d made his way, though. Speaking with Rich recalled my own unease upon arrival, eager though I was. My roommate had gone to boarding school, had all the right things for dorm living, and knew people to go see. My side of our room was bare, though I’d packed a few posters that I thought would be enough, and weren’t, and I knew no one.
Later I told Laura Kirk about the conversation with Rich, and she replied she too had spent time with people she never knew. “Everyone was so gracious and open and friendly. It’s nice that collectively we are at a different place in our lives and able to see that sometimes our earlier impressions were way off.”
The next night, in a dinner line, Judy Kula Walklet looped back to tell me something. “I wasn’t going to come,” she said. “My husband died. Then Annie Cowherd sent me a link to your article and said, ‘Judy, come. Everyone has something.’”
Karen Tyler would later reflect upon how often life does not turn out as we expect. “One thing that really impressed me was the number of positive, thriving people who had experienced really hard, long losses.”
On Sunday we pulled many tables together out on a sunny Proctor Terrace, and Rin Harris and I, as ever, reran lines from “Rapper’s Delight,” which we’d listened to here, as blasted from a Hillcrest window. I spoke to Suzanne Young Bell, a Stanford-trained lawyer doing pro bono work to help immigrants and abused women.
Rin buzzed around nearby. This was her first Reunion; Karen and I had finally persuaded her. “I used to be intimidated by some of these people,” Rin said. “I just had a great conversation with [X]. She was so glamorous, I never would have gone up and talked to her in college.”
Pre-Reunion, I never got the facial peel I meant to, nor lost a few pounds; all I did was have my eyelashes and eyebrows dyed, which just meant looking like I had two caterpillars on my face. I lost a treasured job. But not every thing needs to be wonderful to enjoy friends.
As Rin said, “At this stage we’re more open to gratitude for connecting with others, rather than focusing on how we appear in terms of success, however that is defined.”
I haven’t gone to every Reunion, but while we still can go, I will.
Alison Osius ’80 is a writer in Carbondale, Colorado.
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