HIGH SCHOOL REUNIONS

Attending a high school reunion can be traumatic. Attending high school can be traumatic.

I guess your expectations of a reunion are based on whether your high school experience was good or bad , and what memories you retain. If you were spurned by your favorite "crush", you may dread seeing him again. 

I grew up in Beckley,West Virginia where I attended Woodrow Wilson High School. I knew everyone and  had my own secure spot in the local pecking order. When I was 16, my parents moved to St. Petersburg, Florida where the high school senior class had almost 600 members.

I was the proverbial little fish in a very big pond. I did not make many friends that year and 

never dreamed that some of them would be my friends much later in life.

I subsequently went to St. Petersburg Junior College, then known as "JC" where I made lifelong friends. Most of them had graduated  from SPHS. The two years I spent there were fabulous , in terms of a good  education and also in the sense that I made many friends who are , 55 years later , still very close to me.

My blog is called "gracefulaging" and some of the 100 people who attended our recent reunion exemplify what I mean by that. Oh, some of them are not so graceful in a physical sense. 

But in the definition of grace that means "an attractively polite manner of behaving, or courteous goodwill", that was evident in abundance.

Gone were the days of comparison of beauty, talent, athletic skill. The beauty queens have aged, some not so well as others, and the athletes often have osteoporosis, or other such ailments.

(However, a fair number were still able to kick up their heels and jitterbug!)

So it seems that aging is a great leveler. Hopefully, we have all learned respect and compassion and are more accepting of people and who they have become.

It was flattering to hear people say, "You haven't changed!" and fun to hear them say, "You always made us laugh!".  But it  was also oddly  comforting to reflect on the ride home that 

this was time well spent.  Time spent in the company of old friends is rare and precious.