Homecoming 1987 was my first official date with the man who would eventually become my husband.  We got to be friends during that summer, and despite my best efforts and shortest skirts, Jason didn’t take the hint that I wanted to be more than friends until he’d left for the University of Florida and realized that missing me was painful.

Even though we’d spent an entire summer together and sporadic weekends hanging out either in Gainesville or Tampa, my Homecoming dance would be our first real date, and I was ridiculously, disproportionately excited.  Homecoming at Plant has always been a big deal, and I wanted everything to be perfect.  I found an amazing dress at a little boutique on south Dale Mabry that made me look elegant and willowy instead of just freakishly tall, but when I asked my dad for the $800 to buy it, he laughed and handed me a hundred dollar bill and wished me good luck.  I was able to find a dress that I liked within my budget at the mall.  It was black with a bubble skirt and a high, ruffled neck, and I had shoes dyed to match and made an appointment to get my hair and nails done.

On the night of the dance, Jason arrived with a red rose corsage and a shy smile.    My mom fluttered around, taking pictures and telling me to put on more lipstick while my dad made aggressive comments to Jason like, “I know where you live, you know,” and “University of Florida…isn’t that where the dumb kids who can’t get into Duke or Wake Forest go?” that made Jason stutter and my dad laugh.

At the dance, I got to show off my new boyfriend.  All of my closest friends had already gotten to know him over the summer, and he fit right back into our little group easily.  He was sweet and charming and told me several times how beautiful I looked and even complimented my earrings.  On the dance floor, we got to “Walk Like an Egyptian,” and boogie to Wang Chung.  When Atlantic Starr crooned “Always,” Jason held me close as we slow-danced, and I fell in love with him all over again, especially since he was still taller than me even though I was wearing heels.

The after-parties for Plant dances were always done in hotels, so we all headed to the Embassy Suites where a couple of people had rented rooms.  After a couple of hours of hanging out and doing a post-mortem of who had worn what and who was hooking up with whom at the dance, Jason and I found an unoccupied corner of the room and fell asleep next to my friend Jimmy who snored all night.  In the morning, we all cleaned and packed up and went to Village Inn for breakfast before heading to the beach, most of us girls with our hair still in updos and our fancy makeup not quite completely gone.

Obviously, since I married my Homecoming date, the memory of that dance has particular significance for me.  But when I went to my twenty-fifth high school reunion recently, that Homecoming dance was the source of lots of memories that we all sat around taking out and shining up and looking at for a while.  Some people laughed at how Rob had jumped up on the DJ table and lip-synced “Here I Go Again” as Whitesnake wailed.  Others mentioned how beautiful Muffin was when she was crowned as the Homecoming Queen.  And everyone remembered how all of the seniors huddled together on the dance floor with our arms around each other, lighters up in the air when U2 crooned, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”

I remember that moment exactly.  Several times that night, someone had mentioned, “It’s our last homecoming,” and the maudlin truth of that statement touched us all deeply.  We were first semester seniors.  Senioritis hadn’t struck hard yet, and we were still coming to grips with the idea that we’d be sent out into the “real world” in less than nine brief months.  We’d all been overcome by that feeling of time passing and the need to capture a moment before it was gone, before we all graduated and moved on through time into separate lives.

Swaying back and forth as Bono assured us that “all the colors would bleed into one,” I remember looking around at all of the beautiful faces of my friends, my classmates.  I wasn’t friends with everyone, but I was a part of them and they of me.  We were bound together through the experience of sitting through Mr. Paula’s marine biology class and studying for Mrs. Wood’s test on Beowulf and doing fist pumps when we found out that Miss Glory made red velvet cake for lunch and cheering in the stands at football games and walking through the hallways and seeing each other’s faces day after day for four years.

Jason had let go of my hand and stood off to the side with the underclassmen and the other outsiders, the ones who weren’t members of the class of 1988.  He smiled and gave me a little wave when I glanced back over my shoulder at him, and I was grateful that he had the sense to back off and let me have this moment with my friends, a sensibility that has manifested in a husband who has the good grace and wisdom to let his wife have her own life independent of him from time to time.  In that dim, sweaty, disco-ball-lit sliver of time, however, I was just relieved not to have to think of him so that I could enjoy the cocoon of friendship and kinship that came from being with my class, with my people.  As the future unfolded over the years, I looked back on that brief island of seconds in which I paused on the shore between childhood and adulthood, and I know that Jason was the perfect vessel to help me sail away on the winds of imperfect memories from the fragile iron of high school camaraderie and into the future.