Backing up just a bit

to the old fart discussion, I went to my twenty year high school reunion a couple of months back. Now, I'll confess I had no intentions of going. This was the weekend after I came back from Sunbelt and I had planned on using that as an excuse. I didn't write about it because there was really nothing noteworthy about it (from my point of view, other folks thought it was a smashing success).

It was Saturday night and I had went to sleep on the couch when the phone woke me up. I'd guess it was around eight o'clock or thereabouts. It was my buddy Skinner, wanting to know why in the hell I wasn't at the reunion. I told I wasn't going, that I was pretty well worn out. He said okey dokey and hung up. Few minutes later phone rings again. This time it's one of my neighbors asking me about something else. By this time I'm wide awake so I decide to go to see some friends who're having a wiennie roast. They live a couple of blocks away from where the reunion was held, so somewhere along the line I decided to go after all.

Naturally it was nearly over when I got there and about half the folks were gone. Me being my normal anti-social self stood outside and talked... to the people I see all (some) of the time anyway. With three or four notable exceptions, those where the people I talked to the rest of the evening.

As to where I am going with this, I recently stumbled across a website that had photos from the reunion and in looking them over, I realized something right quickly.

I had no fricking idea who in the hell 95% of these people were.

Now, I'm not sure if this my memory, my lack of social graces (both in high school and now) or my hermit-like nature which tends to make me stay 'round the farm and not get out and see people (unless they're at the gunshop, the hardware store, the feed store, the tractor place, the barber shop or some other such place that I frequent).

I think it's normal to not remember everyone at a reunion, but out of the fifty or sixty people there, I could name less than twenty... and those were people that I see fairly often, so I am taking this as another sign of old-fartyness.