Senior Moments
A Senior’s Observations, Opinions and Rantings
By Charles P. Eberson
This past weekend, I was fortunate enough to attend the 50th reunion of Atlantic City’s High School’s class of 1968. The building we graduated from is no longer there but thankfully many of us still are. One cannot attend such a milestone event without reflecting on the affair and the impact on oneself. The weekend started off Friday evening at Harry’s Oyster Bar in Atlantic City. My wife and I walked in trying to find where my class was assembling. Our search took us to their outside lounge area. I surveyed the crowd and was about to overlook a bunch of silver hair hanging around the bar, when I recognized that these people were my classmates. We were given name tags with our high school photo to attach to our clothing. It was humorous to watch everyone squinting, putting on reading glasses, or taking off glasses to make out the name tags of classmates who were not easily recognizable. Let’s face it. Without getting into morbid details, we have gone through some ch ch ch changes. It struck me funny when someone would walk up to me, peer closely to my name tag and then walk away without a word. To be perfectly honest, I was not very social in high school. I did not belong to any fraternities, clubs, or participate in organized athletics. There was a tight group of four or five of us who hung around together and a handful of others with whom we were friendly. I wrote in a previous column about getting out of my comfort zone so I decided to put myself out there and introduce myself to as many classmates as possible. For the most part, I was greeted warmly and was surprised at how many were familiar with my writings and photography due to social media. On the other hand, I saw how some the high school cliques were still impenetrable. Saturday night the venue was the Atlantic City Country Club, where we all had cocktails and hors d’oeuvres on the terrace with a beautiful view overlooking the bay and Absecon Island in the distance. People who were not able to make the previous night showed up and I was reunited with more of my classmates. We tried as best we could to sum up the last fifty years in just a few precious moments. I did exchange some phone numbers and received invitations to visit these old friends across the country. Even though the time spent at Atlantic City High School was only four years, I grew up with a good number of these classmates all through elementary, middle and junior high schools. We shared history. The only thing that would have made it better would have been their biographies to learn about the lives they have led over the past fifty years. I am sure there would have been some stories to be told. I know I would have had mine. We were the generation of the sixties. We were not going to get old or trust anyone over thirty. We were going to change the world; make a difference. Fifty years later, it appears that time has changed us just as it has done the generations before us. We are older, many heavier and for the men, a bit less hair. But the voices still rang familiar and the friendships have endured over the years. I hope a 60th reunion will be in our future but the name tags are going to have to be much larger.
