Why I am sorry to be missing my 30 year class reunion. For those of you who know me, you may be
surprised to hear this, but I am actually bummed about missing my 30 year class
reunion which is today. When I first found out about this event, my intent was
to attend, but that was before I double booked myself. It is always interesting what actually makes
it to my brain (e.g., my smart phone calendar) and what doesn’t. Kid events are first and everything else gets
scheduled around those. No kid events=no
organization.
Lack of time management on non-work/non-school days is a
problem for me, but so actually is missing my reunion. I started on what I will call a forward only
trajectory in my early twenties. Which
entails being set on a perpetually forward course of action that goes something
like this, graduate high school, go to college, get married-life lesson number
one, I shouldn’t have gotten married so young-get divorced, live what I can
only call my “fertile void” until deciding to apply to graduate school. Career decided, I am set into forward motion
again, get into graduate school, move out of state, finish graduate school,
apply for jobs on the west coast, but not in my home state. The key, keep living somewhere else, live,
learn, move forward. Of course, I never
thought about what life might be like when I finally met many of these fast
forward goals towards which I had been rushing such as having children and
getting settled in a career, for the past decade my life has been more of the
abrupt halt that is sometimes known as growing up.
So why would I want to potentially live in reverse? Now that I am older, although not that much
more mature, I have come to realize that life isn’t defined by the constant
forward momentum of obtaining observable goals.
This may sound very Eastern mystic of me, but life is really about where
you are as an individual in ways that are not readily observable to others, it
is a circular rather than linear journey (again, forgive the philosophizing, I
just got done reading “The Wind Up Bird Chronicle”). Also, once you reach the age that I am, it
becomes increasingly more important to hunt down those that knew you when you
were young, being young at heart does nothing to negate the surprise that I
often feel when I look in the mirror.
Reunions of any kind are part of coming full circle, back to
where you started. While this can be a
measure of how far you have come, I have come to believe that it is more a
validation of who you are. A recent
study correlated nostalgic music (for me that would be the 1980’s) with
feelings of nostalgia for a good time gone by, and thus a mood elevator, an
excuse that I am now using for blasting “my” music when all of my kids are in
the car (although unlike the tunes of my parents, my kids actually like many of
these “old” songs). It is not too big of
a stretch to associate something like a high school reunion to a similar good
nostalgic feeling. Of course, I didn’t
love high school as much as I love my hits of yesteryear, but it is all about
perspective. Once you get past being a
teenager and are looking back on that period of time with people who shared it
with you, it is possible to see all of the good things that were not observable
in the moment.
So I will miss not seeing all of you from Glencoe High
School class of 1984, it has been fun to see the yearbook posts and get an idea
of what people are doing, electronically at least. As for me, I am good, I am on the brink of
guiding three strong minded girls into young adulthood, I enjoy what I do for a
living, and I still have an obnoxious laugh that sometimes embarrasses at least
one of my kids. Cheers to you all, here’s
to red wine, song, and making memories.
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