Drove My Chevy to the Levee . . .

I attended my 36th high school class reunion last weekend. Whoa! What an odd year for a class reunion. The Waycross, Ga., Class of 1973 had its 35th reunion. They invited the Class of '72 because most of us had friends who were underclassmen.

I haven't laughed so hard or danced so long in quite a spell. It was awesome seeing so many people I thought I'd never see again. Rhythm Oil, a group of guys from back in the day who are still playing together provided the tunes. Everything from Motown to the Allman Brothers, with a lot of great improvisation in between.

We spent the evening reliving our glory days. Like the oldsters we're becoming, we kept forgetting we were repeating ourselves. But because our short-term memories are getting spotty, no one noticed except our spouses, who get to hear it every day. The older we get, the better we were. It didn't take long for us to mentally back flip into the late '60s and early '70s. Take "The Big Chill" and combine it with equal parts "Peggy Sue Got Married" and "Cocoon" and you get a pretty good idea.

Because most of us wouldn't recognize our high school flames or friends if we collided in a hallway, we wore nametags with our yearbook photos on them so we could identify one another. I gotta say this. A golden oldies class reunion is one of those rare places a guy can lean over and stare at a gal's chest and not get his jaw busted. You have to get up pretty close to read the smallish print on a nametag or recognize the face on a postage-stamp-sized yearbook photo. Besides, what you might've been scoping out 30 or so years ago probably no longer resides in that immediate vicinity anyway, if you get my drift. I got my mug close to the bosom of one of my old friends of the fairer sex and was squinting at her nametag when she pouted, "Hey now, don't tell me you need to look at my nametag." In a valiant effort to save face, I blurted out, "I wasn't looking at your nametag." Instead of bopping me one, she just grinned and said, "Now that's the guy I remember!" Dang, why didn't I try that line back in high school?

Naturally, there were jokes and locker room humor about Viagra. Miraculously, not a single one of my male former classmates has ever personally seen one of the little blue manhood rejuvenators, let alone taken one. I did think it a bit strange, though, that most of the guys had plenty of stories about unnamed sources that shared very intimate details with them about how the medication works, even its widely publicized unfortunate side effects. Like one guy said, if it takes mission control four hours to determine something has gone painfully wrong onboard, all future flights of that nature probably ought to be scrubbed. At the end of the day, most of the gents agreed that Viagra is like a loaded gun. You hope you don't have to use it but it's comforting to know it's there if you do.

A number of our former classmates have died over the years and we had a candlelight service to honor their memories. I always thought Mark Twain's famous line, "Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated" to be one of the greatest one-liners of the ages. I actually got a chance to employ it when a guy I haven't seen in 30 years stared at me with bulging eyes and mouth agape and sputtered, "I thought you were dead!" Now I know why some people believe in ghosts. This guy looked as if he'd seen one.

Sadly, we are orphan alumni. The city school system we attended merged with the county school system and Waycross High School ceased to exist years ago. Someone located the old football game victory bell, restored it to its former splendor and towed it to the reunion on its trailer. We were the Bulldogs and throughout the evening, old classmates, some fueled by liquid courage, toddled outside and rang the bell as the rest of us gathered around and hollered encouragement.

Like the classic Youngbloods song says, "We are but a moment's sunshine fading in the grass." You wouldn't have known it last weekend. The Big Chill was never so cool. Peggy Sue Got Married again. And Ron Howard's spaceship full of rejuvenated oldsters sailed away into the wee hours with "Statesboro Blues" blaring from the speakers.