My 50th High School Reunion (I Missed It)

My 50th high school reunion was last weekend. I wasn’t able to attend, but I followed the planning all year on my class’s Facebook page.

The only high school reunion I have attended was my 25th, in 1998. I could attend that one because my parents still lived in my hometown of Richland, Washington, so I had a reason to visit and a free place to stay. Now, there is no one in my family left in Richland. Unless you count graves.

Still, a 50th reunion only comes once, and I wish I could have gone. But because of my husband’s health, travel is hard. I’d visited my daughter and her family two months earlier, and I couldn’t justify leaving him again so soon.

My high-school class had over 600 students. I have only stayed in contact with a few of them. Nevertheless, as I perused the reunion photos of old friends on the class Facebook page, I was struck by how many faces I recognized immediately. Others, once I magnified the photo so I could read their name tags, I could see that, yes, that was the person I remembered. And others, I have to admit, I struggled to place either the name or the face.

Some have led very interesting lives. They’ve traveled around the world. They’ve had fascinating careers. Some followed passions they had already identified in high school. Others found new passions. Some lived up to the potential I sensed half a century ago. Some far exceeded that potential.

Some died far too young, far too long ago, as the memorial video from the reunion demonstrated.

It occurs to me as I write this post that I haven’t written much about my high school experiences. I’ve posted many times about my childhood and family, but not about high school itself or about my high school classmates. I pondered why I had not written more about these people. As I reflected, I decided it was because to me my high-school years feel like they took place during a period before my life really began.

I think I have grown far beyond who I was at seventeen. I went 3,000 miles away to college, then returned west to law school in California. These moves, each a complete re-start of my life, matured me.

Then I landed in Kansas City with my husband almost forty-five years ago. Since 1979, I’ve had three careers, two children, one grandchild, and numerous community and volunteer activities.

As these things happened, I felt myself losing touch with who I had been when I was with my high-school friends. I wondered what we would still have in common.

Yet now, as much as I can see the influence of my birth family on who I am today, I can also see the influence of my high school classmates. Even though I’ve had little contact with them in the past five decades. Which is why I now I smile when I recognize their faces in photographs and remember the days and months and years we spent together.

And why I wish I could have attended the reunion. I’d like to know more about who they have become in fifty years, beyond the graying hair and extra pounds. I’d like to hear how they have grown beyond who they were in high school, to learn which of their hopes and dreams were met and which were dashed. To see how much we still have in common after all these years.

Have you attended your high school or college reunions? What did you learn from them?