Familiar Friends

It is so good to be back in touch with people I used to know when I was younger. It is like having the best of two different worlds, familiarity and new possibilities all wrapped into one great bundle. It seems like too many of us become ensnared in our middle-ages by the cares and burdens we were so blissfully unaware of during our youths, and to be able to enjoy an interlude of renewed acquaintances and revisiting memories common amongst a particular group is part of what makes it so wonderful. I am looking forward to seeing people and hearing about their lives as well as sharing parts of my own, and I can't help feeling it will be a really good thing for all of us - all of the good and just enough of the trials to keep things from seeming too unreal.

Also, perhaps because I have not given it that much thought until recently, I find myself more and more impressed with my former high school classmates. We have lawyers and activists, artists and "the rest of us," and it is, for the most part, a very good thing. We are a great group of motivated and concerned individuals who are in touch with the world around us and connected to other people in very positive and wonderful ways. I just hope all of the offspring of our group ends up on the same, or an even higher, plain when they are our ages.

I feel I have changed so much from the teenager I was to the woman I am now. Then I was severely depressed and too introverted for really being able to successfully form solid and lasting relationships but, somehow despite this, certain very positive aspects of many of those relationships still remain. It is a very unique thing to realize that a friend is still a friend even though time, experience, and circumstance have altered the ground rules a bit.

In less than a month I am hoping to be at my high school reunion for at least one of the events planned for that weekend. I am hoping the sight of the older versions of my former classmates (and theirs of the older version of me) will, in the future, excite just as much nostalgia and fond memories as much of what is in our senior year book does now for those years when we were so young, so naive, yet so ready to take and make our places in the world.

I am hoping for new good memories to take home with me to help sustain me until our next class reunion in ten years. I am hoping that I will be able to keep more in touch this time as email and voice mail make that much more possible, and I am hoping that by dragging my sweetie-pie along (if possible) it will help him understand me and where I come from a little better.

I also hope that, whatever the "class prank" may turn out to be, if we instigate one at all, that it is very well planned, totally within the bounds of the law, and good humored more than so outrageous no one else enjoys it. That, however, will take a great deal of some very serious thought and pre-planning.

High School Reunion

It's really good to see you
After all our years apart.
Who new when we were younger
We'd get to be such "old farts?"
But here we are together
Though it's been thirty-something years,
A short but special time
To share hearts and lives and tears
And joys and sorrows overcome
And tragedies averted.
(I think some of the boys from class
May still be definitely perverted!)
We will look out of older, wiser eyes
But know we're only those same teenagers
In a slightly wrinkled guise.

Lives have changed and hearts have grown
Many have children almost ready
To go off on their own.
Some we've lost, but others regained,
Some are too remote,
While the rest remain.
We will laugh and, maybe, cry.
We will gloat (hopefully privately!).
We will all compare our notes
Almost as if for a test - and, gee! -
Maybe we could take a test
And discuss the results at dinner.
The highest score would not decide
Who gets to be the winner.
Perhaps what should determine
Results is mutual affection
That way we'd all come in "first"
Or with, at least, an "honorable mention!"