Reunited

And it feels so . . . meh. I had my ten year high school reunion in San Francisco this weekend, which culminated my Big California Week.

I got to SF on a Sunday evening and proceeded to the Hertz rental car area. The woman behind the counter seemed baffled by the fact that I was a woman, alone, renting a car, not for business, not for my boyfriend, but for me and only me to drive.

“You here on business?”

“No, vacation.”

“You have boyfriend? Husband?”

“Nope.”

“You drive for you to go to work?”

“No, like I said, I’m on vacation.”

“So you have husband?”

“No, just me.”

“You by yourself? No husband?”

At this point, the screaming and throwing things option was increasingly appealing, but I took a deep breath, reassured her as to my marital status again, and was finally handed the keys to my bombastic Toyota Matrix.

It’s a car that looks rather unfortunately like a baby with a load in its diapers, but I was delighted to be behind the wheel of anything after almost a year without driving, and, tooling around the steep hills of Oakland and Montclair, I was pleased with the thing overall. I was half consumed by terror and convinced I’d at some point total el Matrix only because it was a rental, but aside from the woman who backed in to me in Berkeley (“Oh, I didn’t see you!” – which is odd, as my car is directly behind yours and its Invisibility Booster is on the fritz), the garbage cans I forcefully repositioned, and the parking sign I gently tapped while making a three point turn, my week of driving was mercifully incident free, the car was returned intact, and I discovered that parallel parking is a muscle memory thing – after the first awkward sweaty session of backing and filling, it all comes back to you.

Allison and her lovely new boyfriend Josh put me up and entertained me for my first few days, and then I went to sponge off the largesse of Stacey’s brother’s family.

Randy, the brother, his wife Andrea, and their two unreasonably perfect kids, Jackson and Annabelle, were delightful. Jackson, at age 2 1/2, is awesomely verbal and took an immediate shine to me. I’m about as maternal as a cactus, so I’m always thrown off when a little kid really digs me. It filled my heart with a contemptible gooiness when, at 7:30 in the morning, I heard Jackson grilling his mom to find out, “Where’s Liz?”

I had no choice but to acquiesce to the gooiness, and I was firmly a member of the mutual admiration society. Jackson made me realize that maybe, just maybe, if I had a kid I wouldn’t treat it like a houseplant.

I had Thanksgiving dinner/Jane’s 60th Birthday bash with Stacey’s family and Stacey’s mom’s best friend’s family and friends and assorted and sundry others.

The coup de grace of the trip was the San Ramon Valley High School Class of 1996 10 year reunion. It was held at Sinbad’s, a slightly seedy restaurant in the Embarcadero thats main feature is an eerie pirate mannequin complete with realistic looking chest hair, who lives in a glass case up front.


For $84, I discovered that ‘no-host bar’ translates into, ‘pay for your drinks made with bottom shelf liquor,’ and that fried food does not improve its flavor or quality the longer it's left over a Sterno.

As for the people, it was great to see a select few, but I realized about 2 hours in to it there’s a reason I left my hometown, and a reason I didn’t make a tremendous effort to keep in touch with a lot of my classmates. They’re all fine, pleasant people, but let’s just say the lifestyle choices I’ve made since 1996 made me feel like a slightly dangerous and exotic animal in the midst of placid and content cattle.

On balance, I realize how snobby and horrible that sounds, and I don’t mean to imply I have any sense of superiority over these people (oh, what the hell, yes I do). Everyone is just, well, nice and anodyne.

I’m glad I went, and it was good to see people, and ultimately, it reinforced to me that I don’t regret any of the decisions I’ve made that took me from there to here, even the iffy ones.

There were a few people I desperately wanted to see, but I had some communications problems with my POS cellphone and lack of an Internet connection, so Claudine and Joe especially, if you’re reading this, I fully acknowledge I suck!

To sum up: