Limes with Orange

So here's the long promised post about my trip to Toronto. Main point of interest: my high school reunion. Unfortunately, Leaside, my alma mater, doesn't do reunions by year or even by decade... it's all 60 years at once. So it's really hit or miss as to whether you'll find anyone from your year.

In my case, I only came across one person from my graduating class but it turned out to be one of the people from my inner sanctum of friends, so that was pretty cool. And she had updates on some of the other people from that group (aka XYZ*), so I got to hear about how they were doing.

Jeanette, the friend in question, has just released her first independently produced, self-titled CD. So allow me to suggest that you check out her music and her website: Jeanette Lee.

One of the other friends Jeanette updated me on was Jennifer Griesbach, a harpsichordist now living in New York and involved in a variety of projects, including an early music ensemble called Sympatica.

Besides Jeanette, there were probably another dozen people there that I had actually hung out with and considered friends at various points in my high school career. And then there was the ego-boosting comment from one guy who exclaimed, "you're not supposed to look BETTER than you did in high school!" Gotta like that.

*You may be wondering about the XYZ... to make a long story short, one of our math teachers decided to hand pick students for an advanced Calculus class. The course code was Calculus XYZ. We all ended up becoming friends and often referred to our group by that invented course code. Why do I remember that silly piece of trivia? Because I immortalized it in a poem that one of those friends asked me to create for her high school yearbook:

From limits to lines,
derive it three times,
take the integral of the sum.
From strange biochemistry
(what rhymes with "emistry"?)
playing P and C on the run.

Fine food before lunch,
the cafeteria bunch,
first semester with X, Y, and Zed.
Doing phys ed in physics,
broad shoulders and biceps,
formal dates with awfully swelled heads.

All in all it's been great,
all our friends, loves and hates,
doing school work once in a while.
Next year, well we'll see,
Waterloo, U. of T.
XYZ will continue in style.

Okay, now I'm going back into hibernation because National Novel Writing Month has started and I have 50,000 words to write.

Labels: music, odds and ends, poetry