Class Reunion

OK, I decided that I would alter my strong 'maybe' to a 'yes' and sign up to attend my 50th boarding school reunion. So far my 'yes' only extends to Saturday day. As it gets closer I might go all out and attend the Saturday evening "cocktail attire" evening extravaganza. I have gotten a little homesick for good old Dana Hall. I have gotten a bit nostalgic thinking that we all actually lived together for three years in our own little ivy tower with an intimacy that we didn't even recognize then.

I have had a bit of history with the school as my mother went there and also my oldest daughter. My mother had very dramatic stories to tell both of the fierce regimentation of the time and of the drama she witnessed. She was in the ivy tower when the stock market crash happened.  Fathers of her friends jumped from buildings on Wall Street. According to Mom, a batch of sad and distraught young ladies were packed off and shipped home a soon as the $ ran out. That was her perception as a youth in a very dramatic time. I am sure the story was not so very simple. And if that sadness is her memory, it is no wonder that she became a social worker.

She told of having to line up before the house mistress and have the length of her bloomers measured. Even in gym class you couldn't show any leg. The bloomer had to meet the stocking. Even though the world as they knew it was ending and the wildness of the Roaring Twenties was coming crashing to an end, Dana girls had to be proper. She also remembered that each girl had a maid behind their chair serving them at the formal dinners. On the other hand, they did the very same, exactly the same, Christmas Revels that we did and then my daughter did twenty six years later, and the same May Day celebration dancing around the May Pole.

Mom was pretty much horrified when she went to my daughter's graduation from Dana and meals were served cafeteria style and you bussed your own silver ware and dumped it in tubs of water to soak. It was the one sign that convinced her that standards had slipped. At the same time she was very impressed with the brightness of the students.

But some things aside from the festivals were enduring. None of us had ever experienced a feeling of being second class because we were women. Our expectations and achievements were never limited because of our sex. I have met more women in the last few years who tell their discomforting stories about how they weren't expected to do much of anything because they were girls. Or who weren't given the chance at a good education, or who were talked to and treated like fluff. My gang came up at the beginning of the feminist revolution. I never had to fight that revolution because I was handed it.

I'm not going because I am a rah-rah gung-ho alum, I am curious to see who we are today. I expect that the acorns were all pretty obvious when we were youth, now to see the oak trees. And a flirt with nostalgia is kind of fun.