Tomorrow is my long awaited neighborhood Reunion that I had a hand in putting together.
We are expecting 150 attendees to this thing, which will play out in a hall on Long Island.
It celebrates Rochdale Village, South Jamaica, Queens, New York, where I lived from 1964-1971, an exciting development and revolutionary place to live at the time.
I have spoken volumes about the place on this site over the years, and I am not going to pontificate about it again.
I will center on the Reunion in this Rant.
What do I expect from the Reunion?
Well, it is like any other reunion.
I will see people I have not seen in decades, I will reacquaint them with myself and what I have been doing over the years, they will do the same to me, and most importantly, I will have fun.
Many of those who will be there are people who were very intricately involved in my life back as a young boy leading up to my early teenage years, and we have all moved on, lived our lives, and had our families.
We were kids when we met, and now we are adults, so a different dynamic will be in place at the hall that wasn't there 40 or more years ago.
I will probably see people who don't remember me, and if they do remember me, won't have much to say to me.
And that is fine.
We all had our friends, our groups, and sometimes, one group didn't intertwine with another.
And there is an age difference. We will have people there my age, people there younger than me, and people there older than me.
But just about everyone there will share the same common denominator--we grew up in this development, and saw it rise from the ground to a place that we called home in the 1960s and 1970s.
It should be a fun night, but it is way different from a class reunion, so that dynamic, at least for me, will not be there.
But 150 of us will get together, talk over old times, take lots of photographs, and put lots and lots of stuff up on Facebook and other places over the next few days.
And after just four hours, it will be over, and we will go back to whatever we were doing wherever we are doing it.
It will be fun, and I look forward to it.
It's almost like you can go home again, without actually physically going home.
And to be a part of getting this whole thing together makes it even more satisfying.
Needless to say, I can't wait for it to happen, and on the other hand, yes, I can't wait for it to end, too.
Sure, I am playing both ends here, but it really isn't against the middle, it is in concert with the middle.
And the middle is spelled F-U-N.
Monday's Rant will most probably be a recap, and I just know that even if you haven't a clue about my old neighborhood, you will read the Rant and get to experience a little bit of what I did this weekend.
Speak to you then.
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