You know what I find most shocking about having returned to The Spawning Ground for my 25th high school reunion? How much I really loved it.
Not, mind you, that I expected it to be a torturous affair or anything. But I didn't really expect myself to go back and have such a sense of attachment to so many people that I haven't seen in 25 years.
There were a lot more people there than I'd actually expected. Almost half of my classmates returned, this despite a large number the reunion committee were struggling to locate at the last minute. When spouses were added in, we ended up with a great party.
The reunion Committee, by the way, deserves a lot of credit for throwing a kick-ass party.
I'm a little taken aback by just how much we've all changed, and by how little we've all changed.
I have this curious reaction when I see my mother after not having seen her in a long while. I strikes me how old she's gotten, since, in my head, she's perpetually the woman she was when I left Pittsburgh – the woman she was before life threw her some serious curve balls, like several spills that have damaged joints and given her constant pain, or the loss of her husband of fifty-five years. Those sorts of things age a person, no matter how spry they are.
It's that way with my friends. They've all changed physically, despite my thinking of them as perpetually eighteen years old. But it seems to me that they haven't really changed that much on the inside – at least insomuch as I can suss out what they're like in the the brief contact I had during the reunion. The one great truth I've learned in the intervening years is that you just can't ever know what's going on inside someone's head. There's, no doubt, sadness and anger and joy boiling in these people that I'll never see, but on the surface they don't seem terribly different than the seemed to me twenty-five years ago.
Ultimately, I think I find that kinda comforting.
Granted, some of the people I thought were assholes twenty-five years ago turned out to be exactly the same, too, but I think I saw them through a filter of compassion that I've acquired (I hope) since the good old days, so they're not so much changed as understood a little better?
I don't know. The only thing I do know is that I can't ever know, really. There's an old saying:
So, not knowing, I still insist that my friends and classmates, though not the same teenagers they once were, are the same people I knew.
Not, mind you, that I expected it to be a torturous affair or anything. But I didn't really expect myself to go back and have such a sense of attachment to so many people that I haven't seen in 25 years.
There were a lot more people there than I'd actually expected. Almost half of my classmates returned, this despite a large number the reunion committee were struggling to locate at the last minute. When spouses were added in, we ended up with a great party.
The reunion Committee, by the way, deserves a lot of credit for throwing a kick-ass party.
I'm a little taken aback by just how much we've all changed, and by how little we've all changed.
I have this curious reaction when I see my mother after not having seen her in a long while. I strikes me how old she's gotten, since, in my head, she's perpetually the woman she was when I left Pittsburgh – the woman she was before life threw her some serious curve balls, like several spills that have damaged joints and given her constant pain, or the loss of her husband of fifty-five years. Those sorts of things age a person, no matter how spry they are.
It's that way with my friends. They've all changed physically, despite my thinking of them as perpetually eighteen years old. But it seems to me that they haven't really changed that much on the inside – at least insomuch as I can suss out what they're like in the the brief contact I had during the reunion. The one great truth I've learned in the intervening years is that you just can't ever know what's going on inside someone's head. There's, no doubt, sadness and anger and joy boiling in these people that I'll never see, but on the surface they don't seem terribly different than the seemed to me twenty-five years ago.
Ultimately, I think I find that kinda comforting.
Granted, some of the people I thought were assholes twenty-five years ago turned out to be exactly the same, too, but I think I saw them through a filter of compassion that I've acquired (I hope) since the good old days, so they're not so much changed as understood a little better?
I don't know. The only thing I do know is that I can't ever know, really. There's an old saying:
A thinking man is, by definition, uncertain.
1 comment:
Joe,
You haven't changed a bit. I love what you wrote about the reunion. Looking at the pictures, I wish I had been there. I think I would have been floored at seeing a lot of them.
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