Muslims follow the tradition of visiting the Mecca, Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Mohammed and site of the revelation of the Quran, once in their lives.  It is a duty filled with spiritual meaning.  On Saturday, May 6, 2017, I went on my third Hajj, a site by the reservoir on Bonham Road.

Sixty-nine of us graduated from the Saluda High School Class of 1967.  Over forty showed up.  Nine are deceased, including my best friend Nathan Powell.  Some like my old buddy Johnny Wheeler could not attend.  Multiple sclerosis prevented him, big strong Johnny, excellent ball player, owner of the 1966 Chevy SS from attending.  Elliot Dominick, perhaps the wittiest and most self-aware of us all, was long dead having paid Nita and I visit out of the blue years ago.  I still see him standing on the porch of my first home in the Lakewood subdivision of Rock Hill about six years after our parting.

The visiting ceremony known as a class reunion has some of the trappings of the holy Islamic hajj.  The site is multiple and, as I am sure in the case of travelers to Mecca, not just a place and a date but an interaction with a collection of humanity.  To look into the eyes of someone, say Bonnie Boland, whom I had not seen in fifty years, and listen and talk is spiritual.  I saw her present form, the retired special education teacher, but simultaneously I saw her past presence, the girl who inhabited a house on the street behind mine.  Her father’s oil business came to mind along with vague thoughts of her mother and brother.  The carport on the left side of her house and my bicycle circling the pavement in front because it was wider than the rest and smooth and overhung with shade trees and far enough from my street to be somewhere else.

In the spring of 1967 my Wofford roommate was picked out and I had made preliminary plans for orientation for my pending life with Smith Holmes.  I backtracked on that plan to marry Jeanita May Pow on August 4 but Smith did not go away.  For the first or second time in fifty years I stared across at his visage.

His wispy flattop has given way to a modern cut it all off approach.  No wrinkles.  The young man was still very evident in the old man who was to be my closest associate post-high school.  Shaking hands with his wife, the study habits demanded words.  “I know I am going to fail.  I studied but enough.”  Those and other nearly exact fifty-year-old words of his jumped from my mouth as I made conversation with his wife.  Claiming to be underprepared, Smith was always prepared.  He was a diligent serious student.  I can almost see him taking a last look at his book and putting his extensive notes away at the last moment to nervously begin a test.  She smiles at me and says something to let me know that she, too, knows his careful ways well.

I would like to track each one of them down so that I could have a conversation that had a chance to go somewhere: a cup of coffee or a beer and words that flow back and to without a script in mind.  I am at the stage of my life when I would rather hear what each of them has to say rather than give a rundown of my life or share my perspective.  I would like capture some of who I was in the interchange by seeing who they have become.