High School Reunion

I went to a high school class reunion the other day and found the experience very interesting. There were a few observations in particular that intrigued me such as how my class mates dividing into one of two groups, those who stayed in town after high school and have never left and those who left immediately and have never come back. Another way in which my classmates divided was as those who have adult children and grandchildren; as opposed to those who have children in late grade school, middle school or early high school; and finally those who have toddlers and grade school aged children. They also divided by those who continued on to more school and those who went straight to working once high school was over. And of coarse there were those who hadn’t aged much and those who aged significantly.

Another thing that interested me was the number of people who never left our hometown and yet rarely ever ran into another classmate. Even more interesting is how many of them let go of all of their high school friendships and now have a completely different, unrelated set of friends while still living in our hometown. It makes me wonder if it is a perspective thing? This makes me wonder if there are two kinds of people, those who live in the present always looking to the future, and those who exist in the present always looking to the past? This would be interesting to think about for a while and somehow explore further.

What fascinated me the most was how people’s lives had taken so many unexpected turns and they were now at a place they never thought that they would be at decades past our graduation. One choice here, and another there and our coarse ends up in a completely different place. It’s like high school was a group climb to the top of the public education mountain and once there we were told, “you now have all you need to figure out how you are going to get back down the mountain so on your way.” Every step we take that deviates from the path we took up can leave us miles from where we want to be when we finally get back down.

Reflecting on the experience I realized that one of the challenges for our class is that about five years after we graduated our high school was closed and then reopened as a middle school, which means our heritage stopped and our ability to maintain continuity from generation to generation has been ended. We can’t go back to our high school nor can we send our own children to the same high school we went to. And the neighborhood around the school has since completely changed and this change may be in some way related to the change of our school from a high school to a middle school. We were cut off from our past by loosing a part of our future.

The questions I was left with after the reunion were many. Questions like, why did some stay in our hometown and some leave? Why did those who left never come back, why did most of those who stayed wished they had left? Why could I only find one classmate who left and then after years finally came back? Is any part of us the same person that existed back when we were in high school together or has time changed us into completely different people? Why were those who were not there not there? Are we a successful class? How do we define success? Did high school prepare us for our future by giving us what we needed or by showing us what we lacked? Was high school the peak of our lives or the sending of us off to the beginning of our learning to live? Why is high school graduation a transition marker for us when who we are not is probably not very close to who we were then? Why do we come to the reunions? For a sense of completion; or hope; or a taste of the familiar; or closure; or to impress; or for the reassurance that we are all okay and that maybe our lives are okay even if they took unexpected turns?