50 Stories for 50 Years — Post 30
My roommate and I didn’t become close to our male companymates at the Academy.
That sounds strange to say. We lived together, trained together, survived Plebe Summer together. But the pressure of being among the first women midshipmen didn’t leave much room for the kind of friendship that deepens slowly. You were managing too much to be fully present to each other. The guys themselves were finding their way with each other. Making friends with women classmates at the time was complicated.
The Brigade of Midshipmen in 1977 was organized into 36 companies. Mine was Second Company. You live with your company, eat with your company, train with your company. Your world at the Academy is a small fraction of your class, assigned by the institution, not chosen by you. The friendships that form there are real. They are also accidental. You didn’t pick these people. The Navy did.
What built the deeper bonds was what came after.
In the early years, tailgaters at football games. Later, mid-career, Friday night dinners in ballrooms, too big, too loud for the conversations that actually matter. A telltale sign of aging: you start wanting to hear the person next to you.
In the past decades, for the big reunions ending in 0 and 5, Second Company has found a time and a place to gather apart. It takes someone persistent enough to organize it, someone willing to host it — that’s me, living locally — and enough of us willing to show up.
Thirty-six companies. Each carrying its own four years of shared passageways, watch rotations, formation mornings. When a company gathers, the specific memories surface. The ones that belong only to that group, that deck, that set of faces.
This past weekend, our company gathered at my home.
Some had commitments pulling them toward other events, but for a few hours we were just Second Company. The surprise of the night came from a company mate who, after 45 years, named what had long been an open secret. He had been married at the Academy. What none of us knew, and what he shared, was that he hadn’t hidden it from the chain of command. He had gone to them directly. Spiritual advisors and others counseled him not to marry. You see, he risked getting kicked out. Marriage while a midshipman at the Academy wasn’t allowed. He did what he knew to be right under the circumstances.
The full details are his to tell. But every one of us voiced our pride and admiration.
We were winding down when someone asked a classmate’s wife what she thought of us back then. She had been a plebe in our company when we were first class, and later married one of our own. Her answer made everyone roar. Forty-five years on, we still want to know how we were seen.
Another spouse shared something I had forgotten entirely. She and I had gone to high school together in Annapolis. She was beginning to date her future husband — a Second Company classmate — when we crossed paths one afternoon in the 7th Wing parking lot. She remembered it clearly. I had come over, leaned in, and whispered: don’t worry, he’s one of the good ones.
I had no memory of saying it. She had carried it for decades.
It was still true. He remains one of the good ones, as do the others who filled my home that Friday night.
That single rhythm — class and company both — has done something that four years at the Academy couldn’t.
We have grown deeper as we grow older. I believe that. The 45th reunion showed it again. Classmates who barely knew each other as midshipmen sat together and shared stories. The conversations were different from what they would have been at the 10th or 20th. Less résumé. More reflection. At a certain point the accomplishments stop being the point, and the people become the focus.
The ones who keep organizing these gatherings—who have done it for decades without being asked, who send the emails, book the venues, and track down the classmates who have gone quiet—are doing something that matters more than they probably know. They are building what only time and persistence can build.
We are lucky to gather. The 94 names we carried in memoriam this weekend remind us how lucky we are to keep showing up.
Mary, another great story. You really have a way of getting to the heart of things. I’m already looking forward to your next story