Hard to believe, but my 20th high school reunion is coming up next year. This fact doesn’t make me feel “old” or anything, though; I simply don’t feel like I’m the same person. At all. And while I can certainly narrate the steps that led me from a town of 400 in the swamps of Virginia to where I am now, it seems more like a familiar fiction than memory. Odd.
The organizers of the reunion are using some sort of pre-packaged high school reunion web app, where you invite your classmates to register and everyone can see profiles, send mail, etc. I was particularly happy to see the name of one of my long-lost school friends, Leon, appear in the roster.
He probably doesn’t realize it, but he’s the reason that I did so well in high school. I was in danger of being bored out of my mind, unchallenged and unmotivated by the curriculum. But Leon and I had an unspoken competition for who could get the best grades in our science, computer lit, and math classes. Usually, the gap between us came down to tenths of a point. This was particularly true in our honors physics class, where we essentially taught ourselves.
Leon and I were also protogeeks, both of us having a natural affinity for programming. We had plans to start our own software company (”Z-Tech”) and signed up for every free subscription, swag, and sample that we could, under our company name. We worked side-by-side on the state-of-the-art Apple ][e computers that were in the lab, and probably drove our computer lit teacher crazy. We laughed over the old Beagle Bros. catalogs, shared secrets for cracking copy-protected software, and took secret pleasure in crashing the computers of our fellow students when they got too annoying.
I am also eternally grateful for the time that Leon loaned me his programmable Tandy scientific calculator, which allowed me to conduct one of my earliest experiments in parapsychology for the science fair. (That’s a story for another post.)
I’ve thought about Leon from time to time over the years, wondering what he ended up doing, and if the path of his life ever went the way he expected it to. Unfortunately, his last name is just common enough to make him Google-proof. But I’m happy to say that almost immediately after I registered on the reunion site, I got an e-mail from him, reminiscing about the old days. I can’t wait to catch up with him.
Leon, do you still have any of those old 5.25″ floppies around?