I was walking down the street to the tiny apartment hard by Airport Road, Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates, and a thought popped into my head about high school. Happens, sometimes. People tell me I have a good memory. Or maybe I just remember remembering, and I tell them stories about themselves that I may have witnessed, but have lost that first sight of, but I recall the story. Or maybe, yes, I have a good memory.

For some reason, I then thought of the year I got out of high school, and what year we are in now. And you know what?

I graduated from high school 40 years ago last month. Went right past it. Didn’t even think about it at the time. I never go past May 11 without thinking “that’s the day I played my last baseball game, and we lost 6-2, and had we won we would have tied for the league title and gone to the CIF playoffs.” I never forget that. Never. I’m 40 for 40 remembering that one. But the anniversary of 40 years out of high school? Sailed right past. I guess baseball was a bigger deal to me. Hmm.

My class did a fairly good job of reunions for quite some time. We had a five-year, which was informal, and a 10-year, which was not. But both the five-year and the 10-year seemed to snap us all right back into whatever social stratification existed in the spring of 1971. The 20-year reunion was, however, completely different. No one was trying to impress anyone any longer, and the high school cliques broke down almost completely. I still remember one of my best friends from high school dancing with a woman who had been the snootiest cute girl in the school, something that would never, ever have seemed possible in 1971. We had a 25-year reunion, too, at a beach in Orange County. But since then? Not a peep. Not that I necessarily would know, being on the other side of the world and all. And since I went to a private school that drew kids from all over the L.A. Basin, it’s not like we bump into each other at the hometown grocery store.

And then I had another notion: What if I wrote down the names of every person I could recall from my graduating class at Los Angeles Lutheran High School, in June of 1971.

How many could I get?

I decided it was a test of my memory. And kind of fun. (I’m doing this without the aid of a high school yearbook, which is in a storage unit back in Long Beach.)

I sat down and compiled the list.

I am at 60. From a class of about 120

Make that 61. I just remembered the last name of our foreign exchange student from Australia.

That is my own rule: I have to remember first and last names. And I had only the first name of the foreign exchange student, who lived with a friend of mine and played with me on the football team. But I couldn’t remember his last name … till just this instant.

I still have three other half-names on my list. One surname without a given name, two Christian names with surnames. They don’t count. I can see the faces of all three of them. But they don’t count. Actually, I can see several more faces, and I don’t remember a first name or a last. One of them went to college with me. Darn.

Wait. Make that 63. I just thought of two more. If I write long enough, maybe I’ll come up with more.

At first, I was thinking of listing the names, here, of everyone I remembered. I guess I was thinking maybe people would google themselves, and maybe they would see their names on this entry, and be pleased, perhaps, that someone they didn’t know much (or at all) remembered who they were. But then I decided it might be a little weird.

So I will just leave the names on the page in my notebook.

My methods? First, I mentally reviewed every school group I was involved with. I started with the football team, and then the baseball team, and then the basketball team, which I didn’t play for but saw play. And then the guys I would call my friends, and then the guys who played guitars on Senior Square and probably smoked dope, and the class clown, and the guy who died young. And my cousin and all of her friends whom I could remember, and the cheerleaders and the homecoming queen and the girls I thought were cute. And then I backtracked a little to people who were in the drama club and people who submitted things for the “art” pages of the 1971 Paw Prints (the annual) …

Funny thing, a high school memory. I often hung out with guys who thought they were, oh, intellectuals, or something. We used to think deep thoughts, or so we told each other.

A common topic of discussion was this: “Who will be the first person from our class we forget?”

We thought that was fun. I mean, how do you know when you’ve forgotten someone?  The concept amused us.

Anyway, we tended to name the same two guys as “most forgettable” … but certainly by the time we were juniors or seniors we realized that the “most forgettable” guys, in our view, absolutely would not be forgotten. We would remember them for being forgettable. And, sure enough, both of them are on my list. First and last names. I see both of them quite clearly. Hey, I told you guys we wouldn’t forget those two.

High school is such an odd time. Only four years, but so much goes on in your life. Doesn’t everyone remember high school far better than they remember college? Or any other four-year period of their life? I do.

I went to a small school. In fact, it barely exists today. We had about 500 kids in four grades when I was there, and the campus was on the edge of the South-Central area of Los Angeles. Remember the place where the Rodney King Riots started? The intersection of Florence and Normandie, where Reginald Denny was nearly beaten to death? I drove right through that intersection twice a day, from the time I got a car till when I graduated.

Maybe 10 years later, the school picked up and moved to some luxe hillside campus in Burbank. A former nunnery, is what I heard. I never was actually on that campus. And then maybe 10 years after that, a balloon payment came up on the campus, and they didn’t have the money, and the school was moved again, and since then it’s been in Santa Clarita. Maybe 150 kids, now, in four grades. They don’t play 11-man football anymore. I send them money now and then, but … it’s not like it’s really my school, other than the name. And lemme tell you, it’s weird to drive past your old high school and it’s there, but it’s not a school.  I did that about five years ago, and I reconsidered the concept of someone’s spirit haunting a place.

I just thought of another kid. Her father was a teacher. That’s 64. One more than my jersey number (63) on the football team, and way more than half of my class. And now I thought of another. A deeply religious girl.  It sounds a little weird to say the religious girl appeared to me, but that’s kind of what happened. That’s 65.

Anyway, the school is gone, and four decades are gone, too. But I remember so much of it. I don’t think it’s creepy. I don’t think it’s bad. I prefer to consider it a sort of tribute to an important time in my life. My memories of the people with whom I shared it.