Reunion....

20 years since I have graduated from high school. I was reminded of this today when I received a message from an old friend I had not seen in …well 20 years. An old nickname came up which made me grin. “Doc”, I was always the one to find a way to fix those who needed fixing and could usually do so with whatever equipment I had in my locker at the time. I was more reliable than the school nurse and said nothing about how stupid they are for doing whatever it is they had done.

Reunions of this type always bring up life analysis. Have I done enough to be satisfied, accomplished enough to be rest assured I won’t be thought of as a total failure at life, and all that other good stuff we enjoy when we see people we haven’t seen for 2 decades. I look essentially the same, feel essentially the same and in many ways, think the same things I thought then. “Why isn’t the day longer?”, “Why do I live in this arctic state?”, and of course “I wonder what I’ll be when I grow up…” No, still haven’t grown up yet. Still don’t consider myself “done” so to speak or where I am satisfied enough with a profession to call it what I am when I grow up. Perhaps I’ll be satisfied with simply being me and that will be enough when I reach the end of my life, but for now I continue to search for more. I’m satisfied with being a wife, so much so and for so long it actually took me a minute to even recall my maiden name for the reunion guestbook. That was kind of scary. When I looked at it, it really didn’t seem to fit anymore. So while some things haven’t changed since high school, some things have changed dramatically.

I recall sitting with my brother on the hood of the car talking about “someday”. Someday we’d do this, and someday we’d do that. Well, life has a funny way of changing those young ideals and young dreams. We never did do any of the things we had planned to do together. Our lives diverged shortly after I graduated, and they have never really strayed close to one another again. We keep in touch, the underlying connection of siblings is of course still there, but we both have so many things we put before one another that realistically when we speak it’s not really a conversation but a 2 minute summary of the events since we last spoke, and it’s on to our own lives again. It’s the unfortunate consequence of being perhaps too like minded. There isn’t much to say when you know what the other would say since you are saying the very thing to yourself anyway.

The maid of honor at my wedding was my best friend in high school, Sandy. I saw her some months back in the supermarket, and didn’t even recognize her when I saw her. It had been 18 years or more since we’d spoken. We were inseparable in high school. We made it through a lot of tough times together. We lost touch though, neither of us really made the effort.

I still haven’t decided if I will be going to the reunion. Is it worth the time to see people I don’t know anymore, and haven’t seen to contact or know the past 20 years? Probably not, but perhaps it might be good to reflect for a bit, to see if perhaps the jeans I still wear aren’t one of the few things that haven’t changed in the last two decades.