On the occasion of my 25th high school reunion

This weekend is my 25^th high school reunion. I’m only going to one of the events, later tonight, because, well, I’m old and I’m tired and I can’t stay awake past about 9pm on a Friday night. I’d never have made it through the football festivities last night. I also only went to 1 football game in 4 years of high school, so going now would see odd. So I slept through whatever shenanigans happened last night, but maybe I’m rested up to get into some this evening.  

Shenanigans or not, it should be an interesting evening.  I think I am about the only one of my smaller core group of friends from “back in the day” who will be in attendance.  We were all together 5 years ago for the 20^th reunion and had a ridiculous amount of fun, but for various and sundry reason, most will not be attending this time.

We had a very large graduating class so it was impossible to know everyone, but over the years, due to reunion planning meetings and social media, I’ve had the pleasure to get to know better a lot of people whose names and faces I may have known, but who I did not know personally back in high school. I like that. I like it a lot. Life is not high school and not all about high school.  Thank goodness!  

High school is hard (and so is life, but work with me here). If you get out unscathed, well, you’re lucky.  Kids are mean to each other. Just nasty for some reason. Maybe it’s raging hormones or the needs to pick on someone who is an easier target than you are because someone is doing the same to you or who the hell knows what it is, but high school is hard.   

I had what I consider a run-of-the-mill high school experience.  It had highs and lows, but it wasn’t anything spectacular – except my prom dress. That was damned spectacular. – and that’s fine with me.  My parents sheltered me too much by not letting me ride in cars with teenager drivers or letting me go out with friends, so that colored the experience a lot. I did go place and do things, but only sometimes.  I’m not sure what the need was to be quite so controlling, but it’s a long time past. It colors how and who I am now, but that’s a blog post for another time. I do consider my high school experience to be pretty typical and certainly tame.  

I don’t recall being picked on or bullied with the exception of one instance my freshman year of high school. However, the joke was on the jokesters, whether they knew it or not. Some boys chose to tell me one day at lunch that so-and-so thought I was cute.  When I excited the cafeteria, they were laughing about that since it apparently hadn’t been true.  But you see, I had no idea who the boy was that they were talking about. I was new to that school and it was probably just a month or so into the school year. I had never heard of this boy before and while at least one friend thought he was cute, once I figure out who he was, well, let’s just say I did not agree.  No offense to the boy, now man, in question, but he wasn’t my type and based on more recent photos, still isn’t.  I’m not sure why I remember that incident except maybe *because* I was able to roll my eyes and shrug it off so easily.  I was lucky because maybe folks were talking behind my back at times, but I was never aware. If they’d wanted me to know, they’d have said it to my face, right?

The high school reunion is an interesting thing. I have always been gung ho about them. I don’t care if it’s a room full of close friends or full of people I did not know very well, I’m game to chat with folks and play catch up and have a good time.  But I know folks who would consider attending a reunion akin to the torture of the damned. I have never understood that, but we obviously had different experiences. Speaking with someone at work earlier this week, they said, “I have trouble making it to my *college* reunions…and those are people that I *liked*!” Clearly, we had different experiences.

So me, I’m looking forward to a few hours of visiting and catching up or, quite frankly, talking to people that I may never have spoken to before in my life because we didn’t run in the same circles, we just ran inside the same arena.  We’ll be in the same room. We might as well talk.  And if that turns out to be a bust, I’ll get some cake from the buffet, stuff my face, then hop in my car and drive home, wiser from the experience.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I should get going and actually attempt to get ready. I looked all over to find my cute little black clutch purse to carry, but it is clearly hiding in the witness protection program somewhere in South America.  Instead, I’ll carry  my Walmart Tinkerbell purse.  It’s probably so much more of who I am than the other one is and 25 years on, I’m damned sure not going to pretend I’m someone else.