Monday, April 26, 2004

Fairest Colors, Maroon and Steel

imageI got a postcard about my high school reunion. I had half-hoped that we were just a bunch of slackers (as our generation is sometimes defined) and that we would flake on having a reunion at all. (Note: I’m not even sure if I am a GenX - I feel more like something called a Late Boomer, which makes more sense since my parent’s weren’t boomers).

Here’s the conflict. I haven’t kept in touch with a single person from high school, let alone anyone from my class. My interaction with my high school friends is limited to an afternoon with my best friend at the time (who was two years behind me) two years ago when she came to town. A Christmas card from her last year and silence from me (I’m so bad about that stuff). In my early high school years I didn’t have many friends, I kept busy with an after-school job and swim team and the various drama groups (competition drama and school plays). I hung with a few kids, but no one particularly close. I dated in high school, but had no serious boyfriends until my senior year and even that didn’t last very long. I did not go to the prom. I chose, instead, to go to the Wallops Island Marine Consortium biology class field trip that weekend.

I went to my ten year reunion. I stayed for all of an hour and saw a few people there I knew but I was generally uncomfortable because it seemed that these people remembered their teen years and each other far better than I did. But ten years isn’t a very long time after high school anyway. I was only two years out of grad school so the whole school scene wasn’t that far behind me and I didn’t have much of a career yet and there were some people there who had kids in grade school already. Our lives were so vastly different. I lived on the West Coast and it seemed that most everyone else stayed in the area.

So, do I go and feel more like an outsider than I did when I went to school? I have nothing to prove to these people, no one thought I was a loser (a little weird, but it’s not like I left school with that “I’ll show them!” attitude). I was teased and harassed horribly in junior high by a pack of girls and another pack of viscous guys, but that all pretty much disappeared in high school when I went on to the honors and advanced placement classes and they ended up dropping out or going to VoTech.

Will I remember any of these people? Will they remember me? What would I say to them and would I care about anything they had to say to me? I’m curious what happened to some of them.

It’s in October, which isn’t a bad time for me to go back to Pennsylvania. My sister just bought a new house and it’d be nice to see it. October in Pennsylvania is very pretty - the leaves changing and wonderful apples. The reunion isn’t even in Mechanicsburg, it’s in Allenberry (Boiling Springs) - it seems odd that there’s no place in our actual town to have a reunion.

POSTED BY Cybele AT 12:17 pm    

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During November it's all about me writing a novel. Sometimes it's about whalewatching. You know, and then there's other stuff.