It Wasn't MY Wedding

I think I mentioned way back that I was the secretary of the MIT Class of 1973.  At any rate, I am still the secretary of the MIT Class of 1973, a position I have held in some form or fashion since 1975.

I wasn't a campus politician; I went to class, played on the golf and bowling teams, did intramural sports and was an active fraternity member.  That took enough time, that and I wanted nothing to do with campus politics.  The actual, elected class secretary during our undergrad years had been a young lady who sadly passed away a few years ago.

There is an MIT magazine called Technology Review, a wonderful periodical done six times a year.  It covers true leading-edge technologies that I mostly don't understand, so it gets fairly wide circulation outside the actual MIT community.  But it is also the MIT alumni magazine, and the back half of each issue is about the school itself, wherein each class secretary sends updates from his or her classmates.  It's all email now, but back then the updates were mailed to magazine headquarters and compiled and forwarded on to the secretaries to write columns from.

In 1975, I contacted the magazine to ask why no updates from '73 had been in the magazine for the prior year.  I was told that it was because "your secretary hasn't sent any."  They added, "If you want, we'll send you the updates and you can write the column."  I said "sure", and from that point on, I got the updates and dutifully mailed in the columns.

I didn't sign them as "Class Secretary", because I wasn't.  I was just another flunky who volunteered to do something no one else wanted to do (ironic, if you look at my current profession).  I signed the class notes as "Bob."

Then came the class's Tenth Reunion in 1983 which, like each of the first 39, I did not attend.  Apparently I was elected the "actual" secretary at some meeting of the class during the Reunion, and that's where this story comes up.

A month or so after that reunion, I received a three-page, hand-written letter from a classmate to my home in Virginia.  He was known to me, but not more than (I thought) a very casual acquaintance.  He had been the editor of the campus newspaper, and if memory serves, he was from Maine.  If we had passed in the hallway as undergrads I would possibly have nodded, but only if we were pretty much the only people in the hall.

Early in the letter, he was describing the reunion, so I was thinking that he was going to be writing to tell his class secretary what had happened -- including that I had been elected the actual secretary of the class.  That, by the way, remains the only way I know to tell you that I am the secretary; no one ever reported to me in any official capacity that I have that job, and it is 33 years later.

But I digress.

By about the bottom of the first page, I remember starting to think that there was something a bit odd about the tone of the letter.  Some of you may not be old enough to remember actual handwritten letters, so you'll have to trust me when I tell you that; what I was realizing was that the tone was quite a bit more familiar than our very casual acquaintance would have led to.

I read on through the second page; there was more of the reunion but mostly a bunch of information about people from the class, many of whom weren't at the reunion.  The tone, again, was odd in the sense that it was written as if I knew these classmates -- and I didn't.  But he was assuming I did, and that didn't make sense -- he really didn't know me, and wouldn't have had any reason to know who I did and didn't know well enough to have cared about them.

Have you ever had an experience like that?  You're reading something that should otherwise make sense, and it just doesn't.

And that was where my mind was at, right up until the middle of the last page, when he made reference to yet another classmate I didn't know.  That fellow, he lamented, he "had not seen, Bob, since your wedding last year."  Oops.  Not only had the classmate (and the letter-writer) not been at my wedding, but I had been married years earlier!

You would have thought, perhaps, that 33 years ago I would have written the fellow back to ask whom he thought he was sending the letter to, because it was pretty obvious that he thought I was someone else.  But I never did.  And I haven't done so since.  Although I have told the story a few times in the intervening decades, I have never contacted him to see if he even remembers the letter.

I think I'm going to do that.  Life is too short to leave a mystery hanging out there.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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