From a distance

The class of 1960 took a 50th reunion tour Saturday of the former Hermitage High School. It wasn't until Sunday morning that I realized that, in taking this photograph, I was once again replicating an image from my past. (Don Dale photo, 2010)

A memorable photo of the main hallway -- as empty of people as I'd ever seen it -- filled a full page in my senior yearbook at Hermitage High School.

It's a picture that sticks with me to this day. I dragged out my copy of the yearbook this morning, and it was just as I remembered. Seeing it again crystallized thoughts I had in 1960. The black-and-white picture was a demonstration of artistic perspective -- although I didn't have the words to express it in 1960. It appealed to me as a teenager on some gut level as a way of seeing the future -- or even the past. The distinct lines of the walls, the floor, the ceiling -- shot from slightly to one side of center -- seemed to converge in the distance, to meet at infinity.

The picture evoked so much for me in that summer between high school and college -- the isolation I often felt at that age, the predictable and reassuring form and space of familiar places, the carefree joy and absurd angst I left behind in that hallway, and the unknown and unknowable future.

I later summoned forth that empty-hallway image literally and metaphorically on a few occasions in my work in television. More important, it shows up regularly in my personal photography.

It took me a few years to discover that the graphic perspective demonstrated in that shot was a known quantity long before I noticed it. About 600 years ago, for example, Italian artist Filippo Brunelleschi, who later engineered the magnificent dome atop the Florence cathedral, demonstrated two-dimensional geometric perspective: all lines converge in a distant horizon.

Once again, on this Class of 1960 reunion weekend, the lasting power of that long-ago image was driven home -- in a picture I took without too much thought of a scene that was unfolding 50 years later in the same central hallway of Hermitage High School. It was only when I was reviewing the picture today that I realized what I had done. You can see the results above.

The Hermitage High School from which I graduated isn't Hermitage High anymore. It's now Moody Middle School with a $10 million renovation. But it hasn't changed all that much physically. Moody's principal came in on a crisp and sunny fall day to give us a 50th reunion tour.

The emotional impact of going back for the first time in so many years was remarkable. I recognized few of my classmates. But I found myself overwhelmed by specific memories of time and place -- classrooms where I began to study journalism and the English language, the auditorium where our senior play gave me a taste of public affirmation, the surroundings in which classmates and teachers were a scale for weighing how to handle both praise and criticism, and the place where the simple joy of having no serious responsibilities was tempered by a gnawing realization that those guileless days were finite.

About a third of our class gathered at the Jefferson Lakeside Country Club last night for dinner, reminiscing, and music from the 1950s. (Wisely, one of our classmates had prepared name tags with our yearbook pictures to speed recognition.) I enjoyed catching up and seeing how time has dealt with all of us. (I was also struck by what nice, decent people we have all become in the past five decades.)

But none of the weekend's fun activities had the impact of that tour of the old Hermitage High. I was swept back with an almost physical rush to my high school days, when life seemed to stretch endlessly in front of me, when I was painfully naïve and ceaselessly optimistic, when I was afraid that I might not seize each day and make something special of it, when the future was mine for the taking if I made the right choices. Life was, for just a moment, very young again. And all lines converged on a far distant horizon.