Back to School

Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon was a two-day reunion event going on at my high school here in town. I opted to attend the second half of the double-header, checking in on Sunday in the hopes of running into a few old faces.

First, some background. The school I attended was a rather different curriculum. (I could go on a lengthy tangent about that some time, but for now... focus.) It was K-12 inclusive under one roof, which means that my actual senior graduating class was about 35 students. So this was not a "class of '94" reunion. This was a reunion hoping to pull in as many graduates as possible from every year of the school's more than 30 years in operation.

(And... on a tangent that I won't avoid, I know most of my friends in high school -- both those I stayed in touch with and those I didn't -- did not all graduate the same year I did. It's not like seniors couldn't have friends who were juniors, sophomores, or freshman, or couldn't have made friends who graduated before them. Point being, I would think that the "average" high school reunion, consisting of only people from your year, would leave out many of the people you'd want to go to a reunion to see. Weak! Anyway...)

So, it was a pretty good time. Now, of my high school friends I did keep contact with, none attended this reunion. They're all out of state, or out of the country, or just plain decided not to come. But that's no issue for me of course, which is what this story is all about.

The school's been remodeled a lot since I graduated. Partly this was by design, and partly because a fire two years after I graduated burned down the theater I did all my high school plays in. But I knew all this... I'd dropped in at the school a few times over the years. Plus, three of my younger siblings have gone/are going to the same school.

Sure enough, I did bump into maybe a handful of people I really did enjoy seeing, and another dozen or so that were more of the "I remember you!" vein. Naturally, we all had to tell our stories of the intervening years a bazillion times. If you hung around the same people for a while, it quickly got to the point where you could tell their stories to the next people to ask.

A couple in particular are still here in town, and I'm gonna give it a try to stay in touch with them now. Hard to tell from fleeting conversation in one afternoon if our interests are still the same or if they've drifted apart over time, but hey... these people once meant a lot to me. And on this particular day (when more people who mean a lot to me, but that I don't get to see regularly, got together for a holiday cookout at the old stomping grounds in Virginia), the importance of not letting a meaningful connection go easily strikes me as particularly important.