The List

(Finding the Dead Kids)

Someone got awfully sentimental and made contact with old friends and together they compiled a list of all the kids from what was once "our" neighborhood. It's remarkable how many they were able to remember and how many they were able to locate. They made phone calls. They wrote letters. The planning was done much like those done for high school reunions or those of war veterans who served together a long time ago when the world was younger. They asked those who they reached about names not on the list and added them. The reunion was held somewhere else because Germantown was not available to a bunch of middle-aged former kids.

The party was announced as a thirty-second year reunion <@145>though thirty-seventh would have been more accurate. Fortieth might have been more realistic but fortieth would make everyone feel old. Shallow memories were revisited by those who attended the soiree. I note that of a hundred and one kids known to be alive, ninety-seven showed up. Even so, all of the kids were dead.

The reunion of the dead kids was a success, I suppose. It would be held again the next year.

In January, 1948, The Germantown Courier announced the graduation of one-hundred and fifty five "9B" students at Roosevelt Junior High school. I culled through the list of names long forgotten and re-remembered them. Where are they now?

It's our lot to be teased by memories. Sometimes we might want them to go away and leave us to better served affairs. But we owe some good partly to those older times.