A reunion, of sorts

So recently I was reading my college alumni magazine, which I always do, despite my sadness at how impossibly young and over privileged the students look. I went to an overpriced and not-very-illustrious college that I have no strong feelings about, except that I don't feel it's the best place to donate my money (so stop asking!) Still, it's fun to read up on what others are doing, especially people who I've lost touch with. (Which is, almost unilaterally, all of them.) The last issue had an update on one of the school's sports heroes (not sure why I persist in the fantasy that I need to blind-item my observations here, but announcing the sport feels like too much information), who is now a senior executive in a Boston-based company, and is still married to his college sweetheart, a girl I remember being both strikingly beautiful and completely invisible. (It was a small school - you knew everybody, either through a sorority or an on-campus job, or your academic department, or something. But she seemed to belong to nothing and nowhere, but to him.) He was both a star and a foreigner, and my friends and I lusted after him from afar. (I try to forget my own drunken run-in with one of his friends, one of those "I'm-with-the-band" type guys who traded on his friend's attractiveness but was himself a total ass.)

Because our schools' jocks were, like the stereotype, recruited based on their sports talent and not their academic prowess, it surprised me to learn that this super jock had done so well in the "real" world. Narrow-minded of me, of course.

Last night, he walked into the event I was attending. He is a client of my company's, and the minute he opened his mouth to tell me his name at the registration table, and I heard that accent, I knew who he was. And of course I recognized his wife, more by her name than her face. You see, both of them looked so much older. Not old and ragged by any means - he is a very handsome man with a thick head of silvery hair and a fit build, and she is a well-maintained, slim, nicely coiffed woman. But he no longer is the floppy-haired skinny kid running on the field, and she looked more like a clay model of herself (softened, blurred, weighed down, not by pounds but gravity.)

It's been 25 years. We're old. But are we that old? Am I that old?

Later I couldn't find the words to approach him. I don't think he would know who I was, and I am fairly confident he was never aware of my fling with his friend. (I would be giving myself too much credit to think he'd even remember, if he'd even known.)