Reunion

Columbia High School Class of 1975

This past weekend, I attended my 50^th high school reunion. Granted, that’s  a somewhat sobering milestone and yet it felt flat-out wonderful to reconnect with old friends. Lots of conversations started with “Do you remember the time we…” or “I’ll never forget when this happened …”  and it felt so damn good to be with the people who knew us at that magical time in our lives when we were  young and idiotic and filled with dreams.

Our class grew up in a small tight-knit community straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. We ran the streets without any fear. We knew folks on every block, and people rarely locked their doors. Our moms fed whoever showed up at their dinner table at any given time. Our parents helped with field trips and bake sales and building sets for plays and musicals and didn’t threaten teachers with lawsuits if we earned a bad grade. That was on us. Sadly, it’s not like that anymore in my hometown or I suspect, most other places for that matter.

We went to school in that golden analog age of overhead projectors and film strips. Of hard copy textbooks and ugly gym uniforms.  Of timed writing tests on IBM Selectric typewriters and researching card catalogs and encyclopedias to write our papers. And we turned out ok. I had excellent teachers and a wonderful education at that very small town high school. I loved my school experience so much I became a teacher myself.

I guess it’s a normal part of aging to look back with nostalgia but I can’t imagine being a

student now and experiencing active shooter drills or God forbid, a school shooting. Or not just getting bullied in gym class (been there—when you’re the daughter of a PE teacher and can’t sink a basketball to save your soul things are said) but your fragile adolescent ego is being assaulted 24/7 on your phone. Or being prevented from reading a great book because someone with a political axe to grind insists that it be banned from the library.

I know young people today have the world at their fingertips and are experiencing educational opportunities we couldn’t begin to imagine in the 1970’s. And that’s good, because they’re going to need all the resources they can muster to lead us through this nightmare world we’re living in right now. I hope at their 50^th reunion, they will talk and laugh and shed a tear or two  with the person who sat next to them in biology class, instead of watching a recreation of their high school years on some AI generated virtual reality.  

I’m as addicted to my phone as anyone and to be honest, following some of my classmates on social media tempered the awkwardness of walking into a crowd of people you hadn’t seen in years who knew you when you were sixteen. But nothing replicates seeing their faces and hearing their stories in person, especially in this time of frenzied disconnection. So to those classmates gathered in a brewpub on a dark November evening back in my hometown chatting about jobs and grandchildren and the lives they’ve lived—you are my people, and I’m so glad we grew up together when we did.