Thanksgiving Birthday

I was born on Thanksgiving. Every once in a while, it lands on my birthday, but I have only had one Thanksgiving birthday in Hong Kong. That one feels like a lifetime ago. Most of the time, Thanksgiving is not on my birthday and once or twice I was out of the country. This year, I am in Barcelona.

Thanksgiving is not an important holiday in Spain. In fact, they really don't seem to care at all about Pilgrims and Indians making corn and pumpkin pie. No one cares about Thanksgiving in Hong Kong either, but there are enough American and Canadian expats that you can always find something happening somewhere.

A few years ago, I was in Tokyo during Thanksgiving. Japan cares about the holiday even less than Spain, but we found a restaurant owned by some American expats who did a big Thanksgiving dinner every year. Unfortunately, they closed down last year. I don't know why. It seemed like it was the go to place for Americans in Tokyo who wanted a genuine American breakfast. That was my most American Thanksgiving since I moved to Hong Kong. Until this year.

In Barcelona, I went to a place called Flaherty's, one block east of la Rambla, between Placa Reial and the beach. It is an Irish pub that serves a combination of Italian entrées, Mexican appetizers, English breakfast, Irish pies and American sandwiches. They are apparently famous for their annual Thanksgiving dinner. They even show American football games on TV, something no one did in Tokyo. I don't care about football unless the Vikings win the Super Bowl, which has yet to happen. But sometimes it is nice to be in a large room full of other expats talking about our shared culture. I was an American living in China and celebrating Thanksgiving at an Irish pub in Spain, but I was far from the only one away from home.

Flaherty's Thanksgiving menu looked pretty good. They had all kinds of food that sounded like Thanksgiving on the surface, but were not quite Thanksgiving where I come from. There was pumpkin soup with smoked parsnip, date tarts with goat cheese, herb mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes with a Guinness glaze, cranberry sauce with thyme infused red wine. For dessert, they had bread and butter pudding and apple pie. Yet again, I could not find any pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving. They had pumpkin soup, so there must be some pumpkins somewhere, but no pie. The Tokyo restaurant had pumpkin pie, but I think they used Japanese pumpkins. My genuine pumpkin pie quest continues. Although, I suppose at this point, it really does not matter.

Since it was my birthday, I got a free slice of chocolate Guinness cake and more than a few people offered to buy me drinks. I'm not much of a drinker, but I was surprised to realize that I had not had any alcohol for over a year. When you can't taste anything, it would be exceptionally easy to drink anyone under the table. Everyone else downs a shot and they react immediately, or even sooner. The smell of their drink hits them before it even touches their tongue. I can drink vodka like it is water. Fortunately, I know what would happen if I tried to win that contest. I have always hated getting drunk, especially the next day. So even back when I could taste what I was drinking, I always took it easy.

The weird thing about Irish pubs in Spain, at least this one, was that no one tried to talk me into drinking too much. I don't know if there were fewer opportunists there or if I'm just getting too old for men in bars to try to get me drunk. I like to think I'm still young, but on your birthday, you know exactly how old you are.

Barcelona Or Bust

I'm going to Barcelona today. I thought I would be nervous about the whole thing, but instead, I have been too busy to really worry about it.

I have traveled for work countless times. That is the nature of my job. It always used to be relatively easy. Someone else books the plane tickets and arranges a hotel and/or apartment. All I usually have to do is show up and do the work. This time, I had a choice of places to stay while I'm there. Since I know absolutely nothing about the city, I looked into neighborhoods and transportation. Living in Hong Kong has spoiled me for public transportation. I have reached the point where I actually expect to take trains that run on time to get me to work in half an hour or less. Fortunately, Barcelona's transit system looks pretty good. Of course, I will not truly know until I use it.

I will be there for about eight weeks. That is not nearly enough time to learn the language, so I did a little studying ahead. I knew almost no Spanish a month ago. Now, I know slightly more. The funny thing is, the language of Barcelona is Catalan, which is supposed to be more like Italian or French than Spanish. That would be fine with me. My French is decent, as long as people speak incredibly slow, and I know a few menu and transportation phrases in Italian. There is nothing impressive here, but it is far better than my Spanish.

Ideally, I will be working too much for any of this to matter, but I will have to go out and buy groceries sooner or later. It would be nice if I could get by on my own without relying on the kindness of strangers and colleagues. Some of my favorite memories of new cities are walking around and exploring at random. You don't usually need to speak any language to do that, but sometimes it helps.

A Taste of Spain

Next month, I am starting my first real job in a year. In fact, it has been exactly one year since the accident, although the job starts a few weeks after that. It is difficult to believe it has been a year. Time was crawling quite slowly for a while there, but now I think it might actually be healing all wounds. When you are in the middle of something, it is hard to see anything else. A year later, the picture changes.

In that year, I have taken two serious trips out of the country. I went to Miyajima in May and Minneapolis in July. Next month, I'm going to Barcelona. Like Miyajima, that will be a completely new place to me. Normally, when I go somewhere new, I think about what it will be like. I'm pretty sure we all do. What I really like is looking back after I have been and seeing how different it really was to how I thought it would be.

I worked in Paris a few years ago. I thought I knew a lot about Paris before I went. I know pretty much nothing about Barcelona and I had never even heard of Miyajima before I went there, but I had been to Tokyo a few times, so at least I knew a little something about the country. I had never been anywhere in France before Paris, but of course, I had seen a million pictures and heard all kinds of things about the city and country. Since living in a Paris apartment was absolutely nothing like staying in a hotel for a short trip, I am assuming none of the travel books about Barcelona will tell me much either. I'm actively avoiding doing any research about the city. I don't know if that is a good idea or not, but I know that looking up tourist sights would be pointless. It would be better if I looked for grocery stores.

I think the biggest difference between Paris and Barcelona, other than the language, culture, history and people, will be that I had all of my senses in Paris. The first time you walk around a new city, you take everything in – sights, sounds, smells and tastes. Tokyo is overwhelming at first. It just hits you hard all at once. A city like Amsterdam is much calmer. Paris is an excellent city for all of your senses. Unfortunately, I will never smell or taste Barcelona. I'm not sure how much that will affect this trip.

I lost my sense of smell a year ago. I'm mostly pretty used to it by now. There are a few advantages. Walking through the perfume counters to get into a department store does not bother me anymore. I can go to food stalls that sell durian and stinky tofu. Best of all, I no longer smell the selfish smokers and their vile cancer twigs. On the downside, I would never notice a gas leak in the apartment. But how often does that happen? Rotting food is a more serious concern.

Miyajima is an impressively beautiful island, but I have no real emotional connection to it. Is that because I could not smell anything or because I was only there overnight? The Minneapolis reunion was less nostalgic than I expected. I saw some old friends and we spent some time together, but I never felt like I was finally home after a long absence. There were no familiar aromas to trigger long dormant memories.

When you have anosmia, the doctors seem to focus on how much that will affect your sense of taste. Taste is still technically there, but nothing will ever taste like anything. Instead of saying smell affects taste, they should say that smell affects flavor. Taste incorporates most of your senses. I can still feel if something is hot or spicy, but the spice has no flavor. I can hear if something is crunchy, but in a blind taste test, I would not know the difference between a tortilla chip and a cockroach. When people say that mashed potatoes taste different from chopped potatoes, that is mostly from the tactile receptors in the mouth, assuming all other ingredients are the same. The potatoes will still have that potato flavor either way. I can easily distinguish between mashed and chopped, but they both taste like sterile cardboard to me.

What the doctors never point out is how much smell affects memories. While I could see and hear how much Minneapolis changed and stayed the same, I could smell absolutely nothing. I never walked into anyone's house and smelled the same fabric softener that my mother used when I was 8 or sat beside a lake and instantly remembered that time we all went swimming 15 years ago. I spent some time in Chelsea's swimming pool. It was a standard American backyard pool, but since I could not smell the chlorine or the wet cement around the pool, I never had flashbacks to any of the other million times I was in an American swimming pool. Typing that sentence brings back more memories than actually being in the pool.

I went to the house where I lived at the end of high school. There are a lot of memories in there, but they have since remodeled the kitchen and changed the color patterns throughout the house. Visually, it is not what I used to know. Ryan's mother made me cookies. I want to say that is what people do in Minnesota, but feeding guests is probably the most common practice throughout the world. Her cookies should have brought back a flood of memories. Instead, they were small discs of cardboard. They looked good, though.

I don't doubt that my trip to Minneapolis would have been more emotional if I were not olfactorily challenged. The real question is what Barcelona will be like. If I come back and say I did not like it, will that be because I could not taste the food or because Barcelona was simply not for me?

911

High School Reunion8. When Bellyfeel Leads to Goodthink

I had almost no time in Minneapolis on my last day, so I spent the morning at my ex-boyfriend's mother's house. I don't know when we will see each other again. It was six years between the last visits. She is always welcome to come out to me, but it is easier for me to go to her.

My flight to Chicago left just after noon. It is only a 90 minute flight, but since it left from an American airport, I had to be there entirely too early. A 90 minute flight out of Hong Kong would board about 15-30 minutes before takeoff. There are other places to check in besides the airport check in counter, but if you go that route, you should get there about an hour before the flight time. Once you have your boarding pass, however you get it, getting through the x-ray machines and immigration can take up to 30 minutes, if it is crowded.

None of that would fly in the United States. The politicians want the people to fear everything and everyone. Paranoia leads to the illusion of security. Actual security would take too much effort. It is far easier to pay some people slightly more than minimum wage and give them a week of half-assed training. The consequence of Americans living in fear, and their elected leaders feeding into it all, is that American airports are the most cumbersome and least efficient of any I have ever seen anywhere in the world. Everyone puts up with it because that's the way people are. You don't like what your government is doing? Oh, well. What can you do? That is not only an American attitude. That is all over the world. Maybe some day people will realize that they vastly outnumber those who claim to rule over them. But for now, I have to spend the afternoon in a shopping mall/airport just to fly 300 miles. If you include airport bureaucracy, flying takes the same amount of time as driving. What can I do?

There was more bullshit at O'Hare to keep the world safe from democracy, but eventually, I was on a Chinese plane headed to China. I felt a sense of relief once that plane took off. Let's think about that for a second. I was glad to get out from under the blunt force trauma of American bureaucracy and felt at peace when I knew I was going into China. The People's Republic of Bloody Communist China. There is more than enough bullshit bureaucracy in China. Far more than enough. But I would rather go through a Chinese airport than an American airport any day of the week.

When I was growing up, we were constantly told that the United States was the greatest country in the history of countries. God himself pointed down at the good part of North America and said, “Let this land have the best systems of education, justice, science and government in the entire universe. It will have superior athletes and better sports than those pesky Europeans. And it will be a shining beacon of freedom for everyone, except black people, women, brown immigrants, poor people, anyone who sleeps with the wrong person … Hell, in the beginning, they will even hate the Irish. Imagine that.”

In my teen years, I realized that the United States had a few flaws, but that was ok. “Are education ain't perfect, but it be the most best in the world,” they told us. “The judicial system is not perfect, but it is the best in the world.” “The (whatever is broken) is not perfect, but it is the best in the world.” For several generations, Americans were told that we have the best of everything in the world. Just like the people of North Korea or Saudi Arabia, we believed whatever they told us. Americans are mostly pretty ignorant of the outside world, so how would we know what they are doing in other countries. And people from other countries are always trying to move to the United States. We must be the best, right?

Then came the internet. Now, you can talk to people who live in other countries while they are sitting in those countries. The funny thing is, the world is not all jealous of us. Many of them know they got a much better education. A few of them live in countries where the police and courts treat everyone equally, regardless of race, gender or income. Most of them have passports and travel around the world. They see what foreign countries are like rather than rely on government propaganda.

Apologists will say there are places worse than the United States. That is absolutely true. There are still countries where it is illegal to be gay or where women are property or minorities are second class citizens. At least in the United States, women, homosexuals and minorities are treated with dignity and respect, right?

So now we have gone from the United States is the greatest country in the world to the United States is not the absolute worst. How did that happen? Is it the president's fault? Is it the media's fault? Maybe it's those damn video games. Or, here's a thought, maybe the United States never had the best of everything. Maybe the United States has always been a paradise for a select few, a nightmare for marginalized groups and an above average society for everyone in between. Maybe it has not really gone to hell in a handbasket. In many ways, the country is better than it has ever been, certainly for most minorities. There is enormous room for improvement, especially if you want to catch up with some of those northern European countries, Japan or New Zealand. There is also plenty of room to slip further behind. Many of our leaders want to go backward, mostly to a point where they could skim more money without getting arrested. A tiny few want to move forward for everyone's benefit. Most just want to cling onto their jobs for as long as they can.

When I lived in the United States, none of these thoughts used to cross my mind while waiting at the airport. I was a good citizen. I did nothing to upset the Party. But back then, going through an airport was quick and easy. It's funny how authoritarianism makes you think about things.

High School Reunion7. Fried Green Tomatoes on Lyndale Avenue

Sunday was a day for old friends who never see each other to paint the town and remember what it was like to have a spare day to do whatever we wanted. It was also a great day to be out and about. The thunderstorms that ended the week cleared to sunny skies all weekend. It was still summer, so everyone thought it was hot and humid, but this was the coolest day of my trip and it was well under 50% humidity, which is drier than Hong Kong ever gets.

Not everyone had the same schedule. I saw a lot of old friends that day, but not all in the same place at the same time. I had to take my morning run alone because it was too early for everyone else. Especially after the late night.

Minneapolis is a great place for a morning run. Infinitely better than Hong Kong. There are pedestrian and bike paths all over the place. I chose the Midtown Greenway, a former train line that has been converted into a walking/biking path. Since it used to be train tracks, it is separate from the street traffic, making it a safer place to run. In a bigger city, it could also be a more dangerous place, since it is separate from the streets. There are stretches of corridor where you are surrounded by walls of trees and bushes. In Minneapolis, something like that is perfectly safe. In some cities, that's just asking for trouble. On a summer morning, all those trees are more than welcome. There is not much of a view in the train tunnels, but there are long stretches near houses and parks. Most of the path cuts through residential neighborhoods, from Chelsea's house to the Mississippi River.

I had breakfast with two of my old friends, Megan and Kimberly. Megan brought her husband, whom I met at the reunion. Kimberly brought her 6-year-old daughter. We went to French Meadow, which is a nice little café for breakfast or brunch. They are big on farm fresh organic produce and have their own bakery. Back in my day, there was only one location, but they have since expanded around the city. I can't say if that is going to hurt the quality since I have only been to the original restaurant.

Megan had other things to do, so I said goodbye to her at breakfast, but Kimberly and her daughter were more than ready to get moving. We rode bikes along the Mississippi with Shelton and her girlfriend and one of our few male high school friends, Jacob, and his wife. I'm probably going to mention a few names, but remembering them is not required. There will be no pop quiz later. If the names all seem very WASP, there is probably a reason for that. My school was something like 90% white middle class Christian. In the Midwest. We grew up in the smallest of bubbles.

Chelsea did not go with us on the bike ride, which was convenient since I could borrow her bike. The Midtown Greenway is a great place to ride a bike, but the view is a lot better along the river. You can safely ride from one end of town to the other, unless you have a 6-year-old with you. That made it a more leisurely stroll.

Jacob and his wife stuck around for lunch, but I had to say goodbye to Kimberly and her daughter. I would see Shelton later that night. Chelsea joined us for lunch, as did Austin, Jacob's best friend in high school, and his wife. We all went to Victor's 1959, a nice little Cuban restaurant between Lake Harriet and Lake Calhoun. There is no Cuban food in Hong Kong, as far as I know. And this little hole in the wall is as authentic as it gets, as far as I know.

Jacob and Austin had other plans, while Chelsea and I went back to her house. You don't want to go run a marathon after a Cuban meal, so we thought a little down time might be nice. We had dinner plans later, but our afternoon was wide open. Liza and Taylor came to Chelsea's house early because they wanted to see me. Who could blame them? Liza and Taylor were inseparable in high school, and we used to call them Taylor and Liza until someone figured out their names were Liz and Taylor. It sounds crazy that no one thought about it right away, but we probably had a dozen Taylors in school, of both genders, and there were a few famous Eliza actresses at the time. They are both married now and not as joined at the hip as they used to be, but they left their husbands at home. It was interesting to watch them revert to their old dynamic without the newer people in their lives. Erin and her husband were also joining us for dinner, so they showed up early.

In high school, if this group of people had access to a house with a swimming pool and no parents, it would have turned into a party. As adults, we all sat around and talked. This afternoon was the opposite of wild and crazy.

With husbands, there were almost a dozen of us at dinner. Everyone who was at Chelsea's house went to Hell's Kitchen, a restaurant downtown that goes out of its way to let people know it has no affiliation with Gordon Ramsay whatsoever. We met Kayla and Alyssa, another best friend duo, and Kayla's husband. Shelton and her girlfriend made a return appearance. I knew I was going to see people I had not seen in a long time before I flew to Minnesota, but I never really thought about all of the new husbands, wives, girlfriends and children I would meet. There were almost as many new faces as old.

Five blocks away from the restaurant was First Avenue, arguably the most famous live music venue in Minneapolis. Sometimes they have the biggest acts. Sometimes it is up and comers. Sometimes the band on stage will never be heard from again. I have never heard of the band we saw that night, and can't remember their name just now, but they were not bad. The crowd liked them, but that certainly does not mean a record company will. And if you don't have a record company and its marketing department in your corner, you are never going to be a superstar. Hopefully, this band is more interested in playing music than being celebrities because they did not sound anything like the autotune pop idols the record companies are pushing these days.

Most of us said goodbye out on the corner of 7th St and First Ave. No one knows when we will all see each other again. A few of us went back to Chelsea's house. Chelsea has a swimming pool at her disposal every day, so she is not all that impressed, but it was a hot summer night and most of us lived nowhere near clean pools.

No one planned it, but we had an all girls pool party that night. Kayla's husband went home after First Avenue, but she and Alyssa came with us to Chelsea's house, as did Shelton and her girlfriend. There was a little bit of alcohol served that night, both at the club and at Chelsea's house, but nothing happened that a teenage boy might dream about. I suppose that depends on the boy. There was a fair amount of partial nudity, mostly because swimming with clothes on is stupid and because none of us, other than Chelsea, had bathing suits at her house. But there was no wild, all girl orgy. Sorry, fellas.

High School Reunion6. Shiny Happy People

As the main party started to die down, some of us made our way to a very nice suite at the hotel. In high school, I would have been suspicious. What were their intentions? Why does it have to be a hotel room? Why can't we all hang out in a public, open space? Why did someone who lives ten miles away book a hotel room?

But things change when you get older. Almost everyone in that suite was in a long term relationship. Some of those partners were there. There was more than enough alcohol flowing freely that night, but no one was passed out drunk, at least not that I knew about. We all either learned how to hold our liquor since high school or we learned a little self control.

This was not a cheap party motel for teenagers. This was a recently redecorated high rise suite with great views at a downtown hotel for professionals. The bed looked comfortable, but no one did anything other than sit on it. Most of us kept to the living room, while a few people spilled out into the little office room.

The conversation was more interesting after hours. In the ballroom, there was a lot of small talk and getting reacquainted. In the suite, everyone was more relaxed and natural. I learned a lot about Chelsea's quest to find true love. She was relatively shy at the reunion, but in a smaller room with fewer people, her story of being a confused teenager to rebellious college student to confident adult was not as private as I would have expected. She is nowhere near the closet, and after living in China for a while, I was relieved that my fellow Minnesotans were not the least bit judgmental when it came to her romantic partners.

Back in the main reunion hall, one of my old friends said she was a composite artist, also known as a police sketch artist. That sounded like an interesting job, until we were all in the suite. Other than how they use computers more than pencils these days, the details were surprisingly mundane. If there is a TV show about sketch artists, they probably chase bad guys in sports cars and jump from building to building while making impossible shots with sharpshooter accuracy. In the real world, she sits in front of a computer and makes portraits out of insufficient information. She is not authorized to carry a gun or chase anyone. She finds the job rewarding but depressing. Most of the time, she works on missing people, including children.

As teenagers, we would have stayed out all night. As adults, we had to wake up the next morning or get back to baby sitters on time. Not me. I had the entire weekend. Everyone else was in their world living their normal life. That suite gradually emptied out until it was obvious that the party was over. Neither Chelsea nor I wanted to be the last to leave, so we left while it was on its death bed, but still had a pulse.

Back at Chelsea's house, she wanted to go swimming. She had a few drinks that night, but was not particularly drunk. I could not in good conscious go to sleep while she was in the pool alone, so I joined her. Night swimming deserves a quiet night. It was a peaceful way to end a hectic day.

Working Hard or Hardly Working

I was not finished describing my high school reunion, but something came up. I have been offered a job in Barcelona.

I don't really want to get into any details. Partly because I'm a little superstitious that if I talk about a new opportunity too much before it happens, I will somehow jinx it. Mostly because it is a lot easier to talk about something that has already happened than something that will happen in the future.

But I am free to admit how nervous I am about it. This will be my first performing job since I bumped my head in a car accident last year. I don't know if I'm ready to get back into it. I know I'm ready mentally, spiritually and philosophically. Am I ready physically? I honestly have no idea. I exercise every day, rain or shine. I run and walk around Hong Kong. I rode a bike and went swimming in Minnesota. I climbed a mountain in Miyajima. I have been doing plenty of heavy training for the last six months.

But I get exhausted during my morning runs. I used to run around, go home and start my day. Now I run around, go home and take a nap. The bike ride in Minnesota was one afternoon, and there was a child with us. It was more of a leisurely stroll through the park than a workout. The swimming was in a small pool, sometimes with other people. The mountain on Miyajima was mostly a hike over rocks. The cable cars did most of the heavy lifting.

The benefit to taking the Barcelona job is that it is great practice to see if I'm ready. No one likes it when you tell them their job is just a rehearsal to you, so maybe I should not mention that part. But this is not Facebook. Blog posts do not go viral. Another benefit is the free trip to Barcelona. That was never high on my list of places to visit, and I know almost nothing about the city, but I hear it is nice.

If all goes well, I can go back to work in Hong Kong when I return from Barcelona. If it turns out to be a spectacular failure, then I know I still need to push harder before I'm ready. I have nothing to lose, other than my reputation in Spain. But it's not like I ever had a reputation there anyway.

I should probably look up some Spanish phrases. I don't know much beyond, “Hola, yo me llamo Hailey. Yo no comprendo.”

High School Reunion5. Glory Days

In movies, high school reunions are in the school gym or somewhere else on campus. Does anyone really do that? Ours was across town at an expensive hotel on Nicollet Mall, across the street from the Mary Tyler Moore statue. We were in a large event space, maybe too large. I don't know how many people they expected to show up. Our graduating class was somewhere around 600. This room could have held half that. Of course, you are never going to get a 50% attendance rate at a reunion. We had somewhere around 16%, which is supposed to be pretty good.

I never really knew the people on the reunion committee. I think I had a class with one of them in tenth or eleventh grade. They were in the student council/school paper/yearbook circle. I was in the performing arts circle. I don't know why the two did not touch, but when I went to school, they were miles apart. Either way, the committee did a pretty good job. I was expecting tacky paper decorations and some corny theme, but the space looked elegant. Rather than a punch bowl on a folding table, there were a few bartenders serving every kind of drink imaginable. In one of the more terrible Superman movies, someone brings too much potato salad to their reunion. Ours had professional catering and complicated little bite-size snacks. It was more like a debutante ball than suburban high school reunion. But no one dressed for a ball. We were all more casual than our surroundings, made more impressive by the nighttime views of downtown from the 50th floor.

A lot of assumptions were shattered that night. It used to be that people went to reunions to see how much everyone changed. Is she fat now? Is he bald? Who got married and/or divorced? Facebook has changed all of that. Many, if not most, of the people there were in communication with each other online. Facebook friends already saw all the recent pictures of aging, relationship comings and goings, families and jobs. The entire reunion was organized on Facebook, and in a private group, no less. I could not even look at it because I don't have a Facebook account. My initial reaction was that, had they used other media, maybe more people would have known about it. If I had not been told about it outside of social media, I would have never known. Surely, I cannot be the only person who never uses the Facebook. But the turnout was pretty high. Contacting everyone by e-mail and phone would have been far more work, and maybe fewer people would have put in the effort.

Another thing I expected was for everyone to segregate themselves into their old high school cliques. That is what you do in high school. Our entire school had around 2,000 students. Nobody knew that many people. We all decide what clique we should be in and generally stick to those people. At the reunion, we all mingled with old friends, of course, but it looked like everyone was grouping themselves around their Facebook friends. A good example was Chelsea. She would have never spent any time with the science nerds in high school, but at the reunion, her best friend was someone we all expected to grow up and cure cancer or discover some new element.

Like a lot of high school ambitions, that one went nowhere. Most Likely to Cure Cancer now works in a cubicle at some office job. She was never actually voted Most Likely to Cure Cancer. I doubt we had that category. But we all assumed she would become a scientist. Just like we all assumed the quarterback of the football team would join the NFL or that diva who got the best parts in almost every single play, even though I was always the better choice, would become an actor. Neither did. The quarterback played football in college, but then went into business administration. The diva works in a hotel.

Students at our school were always expected to succeed. We had that Most Likely to Succeed category in our yearbook, which is pretty stupid when you think about it. All schools should expect every student to succeed, and ours did, more or less. We were always on every list of top schools in the country. The debate team was ranked in the top 20 in my senior year. Our theater group performed on Broadway. The marching band won field competitions every year I was there. The list of state championships for the athletic teams is ridiculously long. At my old school, 95% of graduates go to college. The national average is around 66%. I looked it up because I figured 95% had to be pretty high.

That kind of pressure can burn out a teenager. Some of our biggest stars just kind of faded away. But more than a few did what everyone expected of them. There were a lot of MBAs at that reunion. Several are getting started in politics and law. A few are professional hockey players. At least one swimmer and one tennis player competed in the Olympics. One of my old friends in the marching band performs with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Others are with the Minnesota Orchestra and New York Pops. But it is not all high brow. One of our trumpet players is in the acid reggae band, Dick Cheney. That might not be the best name for a band. If you do a Google search, they are not the first thing to show up.

Speaking of yearbooks, some people actually brought theirs. For all the things Facebook has changed, it seems yearbooks are immune. I'm sure there are plenty of old pictures scanned and uploaded to that private Facebook group, but physical copies were passed around that night for people to sign and reminisce. I signed a lot of yearbooks in high school. My policy was always to write a little something for anyone who asked, whether I liked them or not, or even knew them. We all knew it was for posterity. But when you are an adult, “Have a cool summer” does not work anymore.

I don't remember the last time I saw any of my old yearbooks. I don't even know where they are or if they still exist. Having never looked at them since high school, it was nice to flip through the pages one last time. The reunion was definitely the best place for that.

Since I was one of the few people not connected online, I had the old style reunion experience where everyone did not know what I was up to lately. I could pretend to be as rich and successful as I wanted. Only three things stood in my way. I was not painfully insecure in high school, so I don't need to show them. I don't like lying if I can avoid it. If it is a life or death situation, a lie might be the most moral thing to do. But deception for personal gain, even something as inconsequential as a high school reunion, is unethical. What really kept me out of fantasyland, however, was that a few people knew what I had been doing since graduation.

Anyone who knew me in school knew that I always wanted to be a dancer. So that was the inevitable first question. Am I a famous ballerina now? Do I travel all over the world dancing in the great concert halls? Have I met Baryshnikov? No, kind of but not really, and no.

I was not designed to be a ballerina. I know the moves and understand the music, but my body was made for lyrical, jazz, tap and various folk dances. I have performed in a few different countries, but not at all the most famous venues with the world's greatest dancers. I have never met Baryshnikov, but I am ready, willing and able. All he has to do is call.

The other questions were just as predictable. No, I'm not married, or divorced. No children. I don't own a house, or even a car. Home ownership seemed to be a big issue at the reunion. Maybe I should have invented a fantasy life.

But there is something about my life that Americans tend to find fascinating. Far more people asked me about Hong Kong than about dancing. I never even think about it, really. Seven million other people live here, and when you add China, that number gets a lot higher. It is not so exotic to a huge chunk of the humans on this planet. Besides, everyone lives somewhere. When you go to high school in Minnesota, most of your classmates stay in the Midwest. A few move to the East Coast. I'm the only one who left the country for any amount of time, at least at the reunion. So I got a small taste of minor celebrity. Not for doing something I have always loved, but for packing my bags and going away.

One person who was not at all impressed by my life in Hong Kong was my former boyfriend. We started dating in high school and broke up four years after we moved to China together. He never really liked Hong Kong and does not see it as exotic at all. To him, it was always crowded, noisy and full of unattractive women. Seeing him at the reunion was inevitable. We were in the same graduating class, and his mother told me he would be there. She also told me that he was married, so meeting his wife was no big surprise. The wife seemed nice enough, and exactly like the kind of woman he should be with, which is very different from me. The older I get, the more I wonder what I was thinking. In high school, everyone told me we were incompatible, but when you are in high school, you never listen. The great thing about eventually coming to my senses is that I felt no jealousy whatsoever when I met his wife. They looked like a happy couple and I am genuinely happy for them. Had I ever married him, we would both be miserable.

My biggest expectation for the reunion was to catch up with old friends. We did, or at least those of us who showed up did. And it was easier than I thought it would be. We all picked up where we left off and probably could have stayed there if not for how far away I live. I suppose I could join Facebook and be “friends” with them, but I don't define friendship as clicking a button under someone's picture.

On the opposite end, I was surprised by how easy it was to get along with old enemies. I never really had any enemies in high school, but there was one girl who did not like me after a lot of drama went down. She definitely picked a side and it was not mine. As teenagers, she thought I was an evil demon sent to lead all the self-righteous into temptation. She actively did whatever she could to destroy my reputation with both students and teachers. Fortunately, my friends thought she was a nutjob and my teachers cared more about grades than gossip. As adults, I was prepared to simply avoid her if she showed up. But when she came to talk to me, she said she admired how I went off into the wide world of adventure. She thought it was brave to move to another country and pursue my dreams. I told her she could easily do the same, anyone can, but she seemed convinced that her unhappy domestic life was her cross to bear. I let that competition go a long time ago, but apparently, I won without ever knowing it.

The reunion committee planned a few activities for that weekend – a baseball game, picnic in the park, three legged race type of things – but some of us decided to do our own thing. Most of them live within two hundred miles of each other. I was the one who was going to be out of the picture for a long time when the weekend was over. That made me popular again. I did not go to my high school reunion as a rich and famous ballerina, but the people who liked me wanted to spend more time with me while they could. That is success.

The great thing about nostalgia is that everyone remembers the good parts and forgets or glosses over the bad. When you are in school, you want to get out, either to college or start your career, or just get out of there. A large chunk of high school is pure tedium. Considering the age range, I'm sure we all went through a lot of emotional and hormonal turbulence. But at the reunion, no one talked about staring at the classroom clock and willing it to move faster. We all talked about the good parts and even some of the embarrassing parts, if we could laugh about them now.

High school is one of the strangest things we all get to experience. It dominates every aspect of our lives for a few years. It might be the last place you can effortlessly make best friends. It is where you learn to be who you are, discover boys or girls or both, break away from your parents and, in many ways, it determines how far you will go for the rest of your life. The best part is that when it is over, it is over forever. You never have to go back. But you can if you want to.

High School Reunion4. News From Lake Wobegon

Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning. She had the entire day off since it was Saturday. It was also reunion day, so she had a lot of plans for us.

After breakfast, that I made because we both agreed I was a much better cook, we hit the town hard. Summer Saturday mornings mean a trip to the Mill City Farmers Market at the Guthrie Theater. Chelsea is surrounded by fresh produce all the time, and can go to the farmers market any Saturday, but this was the only day for me. Where I live, there is nothing like it. We have plenty of produce markets all year long, but that is like comparing homemade tagliatelle with canned spaghettios. One of those life ironies is that I make 90% of my meals with ingredients that are nowhere near this fresh, while Chelsea has produce picked from the farm that morning, but mostly eats out. The farmers market also had cooking lessons, but we did not have enough time.

The thunderstorms and ominous clouds of Friday were gone. This was a typical sunny and hot summer day. Chelsea and more than a few others complained about the humidity, but it felt pretty mild to me. And it was not especially hot. This Saturday was also the opening of the beer festival, international food truck rally and the tequila & taco festival. There were plenty of arts and crafts fairs, movies in the park and block parties. Things would really start get going after I left. The city does more than enough to keep people active and engaged. Summer is not such a bad time to go to Minneapolis. Then there is the Minnesota state fair. Our state fair is a great state fair, but I missed it. I was too early.

There were a million live performances that night, but that was also reunion time. I would have loved spending the evening at the Cowles Center, Orpheum or State Theatre, but I flew halfway around the world for the reunion, not to see a show.

Chelsea did not want to spend the afternoon running around some lakes or doing anything particularly energetic. She was looking forward to being wide awake at the reunion. So we went to the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Not only does it require no exertion, but it is indoors and air conditioned. We have museums in Hong Kong, but nothing like this. I have nothing against Chinese art, but it does not move me the way Rembrandt, van Gogh, Manet, Gauguin, Matisse and Goya can. Ironically, MIA brags that they have one of the largest Asian art collections in the United States.

Chelsea's house is only a few miles from the museum, so we had enough time to go back and get ready before heading out.