Regrets? I have a few...

Peggy Sue Got Married was released in 1986, and it was a baby boomer’s movie if I ever saw one—the main character, played by Kathleen Turner, is a married woman who, at her 2^5th reunion, hits her head and is suddenly transported back to high school. Now, the film, which was directed by Francis Ford Coppola, is no Apocalypse Now: it has many flaws (not the least being Nicolas Cage and Kathleen Turner trying, painfully, to portray high school students) but the scene that I still remember was the one when Kathleen Turner goes downstairs and sees her mother (who was, in her “real” life, now dead) and tears up at the tableau:  the old kitchen table, her parents, her bratty little sister, a regular morning from her youth to live all over again. She just chokes up, and I did, watching this—even though I was just out of high school myself.

Peggy Sue also asks the question, what would you do over again if you could? It's an enduring theme in pop culture, one approached most cleverly in Lost when Hurley “writes” The Empire Strikes Back.  As much as we want (and need) to live and be in the present, from time to time, this idea appeals to us. Reunions, I think, are one of those times. 

Yet the movies focus almost solely on romantic regrets. Peggy Sue becomes involved with a beatnik who, as you might guess, wears all black, is rebellious, and writes bad poetry that we are supposed to find brilliant. Then, of course, she realizes that an insensitive lout of a husband is still better than a Kerouac-spouting beatnik-- an important lesson to us all. The problem with all of this is not just the predictability of this plot, but that romantic regrets are probably not at the top of most people’s lists of what they would change about their pasts.

So here is my list of what I would change, if I get hit on the head at the reunion and find myself back at Gilford in 1986. Feel free to add your own.

• I would take an art class and not be so worried about my art not being as good as everyone else’s.
• I would have paid attention when my father, and then my driver’s ed teacher, showed me how to change a flat tire. 
• I would have made more of an effort in math class. No, a “C” is not OK. No, “I’m bad at math” is not a good excuse. Math is actually pretty important in everyday life—Mr. Stephenson was right. 
• I would not have gotten up at 5:30 AM to blow dry and curl my hair, then spray it with Aqua Net until it didn’t move. 
• (and this one is impossible) I would not have seen every slight, every rejection, every bad grade or bad day—perceived and real—as evidence that Janis Ian was right, and that it would never get any better.

One of my colleagues has a young daughter, and when her daughter was in the toddler room at day care, she thought that all of the toddlers would simply turn into babies again and cycle back through the infant room, ad infinitum. When told that this didn’t happen, she was both sad and relieved, a response I can understand completely.