Remembering the Titans at 50: A Class Letter From Alexandria

ALEXANDRIA, VA – Last month I went to my 50^th high school class reunion.    Despite the busy cash bar the event was sobering experience.

And that’s not because of the sudden shock upon entering the Westin Old Town hotel ballroom of being confronted “en masse” with such a loss of hair (other than nostril or ear),  thickening of waistline,  sagging of jowl, and accumulation of wrinkles which pretty predictably but insidiously occur sometime between one’s golden youth and one’s golden years.  No, we TC Williams Class of ’75 Titans were viewing each other that Saturday evening through those kind of magical reunion goggles (unfortunately only available to one’s long ago peers) that can instantly transform liver-spotted and bent 68 year olds into their former dewy and lithe 18 year old selves.

Nor was the psychic jolt from any of the rags to riches (and vice versa) life story arcs of our classmates which were being conversationally exchanged, round-robin, at a pace of about fifteen years per minute.  No particular surprises there either. You could have reliably forecast back at our graduation ceremony who among us would be smugly clipping bond coupons now and who would be desperately clipping grocery store ones.

And it wasn’t from the inevitable revelations about who had switched sexualities, genders, or spouses during the intervening decades either.  That  genre of gossip becomes a whole lot less salacious once you’re a sexagenarian-something.

The thunderbolt for me at this reunion was parked discreetly at stage left near the end of the buffet line.  It was the name and yearbook-photo adorned “Titan Memorial”  display.  That poignant tribute to the excused absences (by reason of death) of roughly 110 members of our Class of ‘75 was a stark and unmistakable reminder of the unavoidable joint future in store for all of us graduated seniors who had somehow morphed into those other kind of seniors.  Since our graduating class had 871 members and 110 of them were now eternally beyond the long artificial intelligence and social media reach of our very diligent reunion committee, you didn’t have to have been a “brainiac” back in high school statistics class to do that math.  Almost 13% of us were already gone before the U.S. Social Security Administration’s average life expectancy age for those of us Americans born in the year 1957 (74.4 for men and 80.1 for women).   Certainly some of the familiar, heart-breaking names memorialized up there weren’t completely unexpected (“drugs n’ thugs”) but even with the most assiduous (and self-delusional) denial of such metadata you still couldn’t help but come to the inescapable conclusion that ultimately (and relatively sooner rather than later) our entire class will all be featured on that posterboard of doom.

And when that happens our collective memory of ourselves in the Alexandria of that micro era will be gone forever.   Sure there will be some campy photographs and that phony Disney flick about the state championship football team from our freshman year (“Remember The Titans”) but the time itself will have been irrevocably extinguished along with ourselves.  Without any eyewitnesses left to remind each other of the slice of life which we occupied in common during that time our real and shared adolescent coming of age will have been entirely overcome by age. Seventeen years ago our old school building was demolished and four years ago its old racist name was changed so there will be no architectural relics around either.

Even our epic “streak” through the now also demolished Landmark Center shopping mall will have ceased to exist.  It’s already beginning to fade in living memory even though only one of its naked runners has graduated to posterboard memorial status .  A girl (now a grandmother) who rode shotgun next to our getaway car driver in that Chevy Caprice stuffed with eight naked bodies (which, post-streak, got stuck in a traffic jam on Duke Street and then got pulled over by the cops) was in attendance however.  She seemed to have convinced herself (and possibly her trailing spouse husband as well) that she too was an actual streaker rather than merely a fully clothed “accessory to indecent exposure” on that long ago afternoon.   Happily there were still enough of us extant exhibitionists present to prevent any such revisionist history from becoming gospel.

But how many of us will be there to keep the record straight by our 55^th reunion?

As the deejay spun Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family”  (an oldie from four years after our graduation) to aptly signal the last dance of that nostalgia and epiphany filled evening I congratulated the “science nerd” alum who had put that expertly crafted and meticulously researched “Titan Memorial” display together and was now beginning to dismantle it.  He said that he intended to throw it away . I asked him why he wouldn’t just keep those tasteful existing panels and sadly add whatever few more names might be necessary to them for our 55^th.  Like the grim reaper’s accountant he patiently explained, “Actuarially, five years hence I’ll probably need about twice as many panels as now so it’ll just be easier to start anew when I have the most up to date mortality data.”

So the message here is one of the themes that we probably should have been paying much more attention to during our English Literature class fifty years ago instead of skipping class to go streaking;  Carpe Diem.

Dan Wittenberg  T.C. Williams Class of ‘75