Monday, October 10, 2005

reunionville

My 20th high school reunion went on without me this weekend.

High school for me was not a super-enjoyable experience: not quite as bad as getting your wisdom teeth removed and not quite as good as being on a long plane ride with a boring book. I did not love it.

However being the curious and nosy person that I am I always enjoy seeing how people have turned out and how they've aged and my, some of us have aged a little more than others, have we not? Of course some of them turned out to be a little more sumthin' sumthin' than others, too, which is OK.

I'm lucky, I have great genes, so I'm still getting carded from time to time -- flattering, amusing and incredibly myopic but bless them anyway, I say. And I have a cool job and a good education and am generally happy with myself. Others, well, time has not been kind, either in looks, finances or life. The girls seem to fare better than the guys -- thanks to the gift of good makeup and a night-time skin regimen.

My 9th grade locker mate e-mailed me the pictures she took. How strange to look at those faces after all this time and think about the things we went through and the cliques and dividing lines that existed. People that wouldn't have spoken or acknowledged one another's presence were evidently tipping back a few and having a great time at the reunion. I'm sort of sorry I missed it -- but there's always the 25th. Maybe that time I will be in the pictures and not just looking at them.

1 comment:

Chixulub said...

I didn't go to my tenth because they wanted an outrageous fortune for this extravagant banquet thing. My class officers are, respectively, an attorney, an anesthesiologist, a CPA and an MIA. The MIA, I mean, no one knows where the hell she went, so we have three professionals organizing the thing, at an age when they hadn't started having babies and whatnot.

I settled for taking my fam to the homecoming game, where I saw a lot of the people I haven’t bothered to keep in touch with. What struck me was that the high school students at the game looked like children. The girls I went to high school with looked like women to me when I went to high school, but that was through a teen’s eyes. Only when you’re 18 can you think of someone as a ‘well preserved 32.’

Someone who might have been cute at 18 was incredible at 28. I wonder if I’ll think the same thing in a couple of years when they’ll be, on average, 38.