Carolyn Trout's Newspaper Column

Our high school teacher Carolyn Trout, who came a long way with her husband, Tom, to attend Saturday night's party, is the retired director of the Joplin Public Library in Missouri, where she lives. She writes a monthly general interest column for The Joplin Globe, the local newspaper there. She asked me to give everyone a sneak peek at her August 2009 column (she says she swears she didn't see Ed Rzonca's blog reference to speed dating before writing it):

Going Home Again

By Carolyn Trout

Thomas Wolfe said you can't go home again. He was about half right.

You can go home again. However, you’ll get lost finding it because the highway has been rerouted, and when you finally get there, you’ll find the house painted like an American flag and a dog kennel where the back porch used to be.

We’ve just returned from a trip to scenic northern New Jersey, which we left in 1979 and haven’t seen since.

The little white cottage where we first lived was still there, only it is now a patriotic red with blue trim.

Our second home was vaguely recognizable, but our once-treeless yard is now a jungle of trees and greenery that virtually engulfs the house.

Our third New Jersey house, however, turned out to be the heart-breaker.

It was a company-owned house on company property. The plant is now closed, the houses abandoned.

We parked on the side of the road and contemplated the ruin where we once lived. Shedding shingles and siding, studded with broken windows, the house is a derelict. Wild turkeys roam the yard.

In this particular case, Thomas Wolfe was right on the money.

The houses, however, were just the side dishes to the main entrée reason for the trip.

In a previous incarnation, I taught high school English for the decade we lived in New Jersey. After I finally decided that when I grew up I wanted to be a librarian, I never darkened a high school classroom door again.

So, when the Newton (NJ) High School class of 1974 planned their 35th reunion and invited all their teachers, my husband and I decided that the invitation provided the perfect reason to return to a place where we’d accumulated a decade’s worth of joyful memories.

Everyone who has gone to a reunion knows about the pre-reunion jitters.

As a teacher, I was spared some of those apprehensions – the ones about seeing old crushes or reliving how it felt to be an outsider in the clique-ridden world of high school.

However, I wasn’t spared the biggest jitter of all – the knowledge that I look one heck of a lot different than I did 35 years ago. Back then I was a cute little twenty-something with long dark hair to my (tiny) waist, and my hemline was a conservative 6” above my knee.

It was the Seventies. What can I say.

I was sure my former students wouldn’t know me. And when they figured out who I was, their expressions would reflect horror and dismay.

My apprehensions vanished after the first three minutes.

I’ve never participated in a happier or noisier love-fest. Or a warmer one. Two hundred people can generate an awful lot of heat and decibels.

Thank heavens for name tags. The reunion organizers had thoughtfully put our 1974 student or faculty yearbook pictures above our names.

It was a trifle awkward at first, meeting someone and then leaning in to gaze at his or her nametag.

I overheard one woman comment that it was discomfiting to look at someone’s chest first. The man with her assured her that men were used to doing exactly that.

The whole evening was sort of like speed dating on steroids. Peer at nametag. Shriek. Hug. Jump up and down. Gibberish at high volume for a couple of minutes. DING! Move on to next person. Peer at nametag. Shriek. Hug. Etc.

We spent a weekend surfing on waves of nostalgia, and it was just grand. So, Mr. Wolfe, going home again is indeed possible, even if they’ve moved the highway that takes you there.