I laughed when my daddy told me about attending his fiftieth class reunion at Mississippi State.
He and my mother opened the door to the room where the Class of 1932 was scheduled to meet and quickly closed it returning to the reception desk.
They were sure they had been directed to the wrong place because the people in that room were far too old to have been their age!
I so understand. Inside this 68 year old body, I like to think there is still an eighteen year old!
An email arrived the other day from a former classmate taking a poll on the interest in a fiftieth high school class reunion. Indianola High School no longer exists.
It was a casualty of the United States Department of Justice’s school busing mandate that dismantled and restructured the public school system across Mississippi in January of 1970.
That is not a judgement one way or the other, merely a fact.
Being the last class to claim IHS as alma mater might have something to do with why we all have a sense of close kinship regardless of how few times we have seen one another in the past five decades.
Most of the 69 classmates in the Class of 1969 started school together as first graders in the fall of 1957.
Some of us had been to kindergarten and some of us had not.
We learned to read and write together sitting side by side in the small wooden chairs in the long ago demolished original Lockard Elementary School.
Just remembering it brings to mind the smell of Johnson’s Paste Wax buffed to high gloss on the hardwood plank floors, the scent of the purple ink on a freshly mimeographed test paper, and the sound of the hand cranked pencil sharpener grinding the lead on those fat round No. 2 pencils provided to us at regular intervals by our teachers.
The friendships I hold dear began back then and deepened over twelve years of constant contact in the classroom, on the playground, or on the athletic field.
We suffered through many a significant milestone together.
We share the same memories, and we know each other’s painful secrets.
We remember when we really did look like those awful School Day Pictures with buck teeth, frizzy hair and all, and faces even a mother could barely love.
When we covered our faces in Clearasil every night to no avail or when we stood, minds blank, with sweaty hands and red faces in front of the English class attempting to recite the Prologue to Canterbury Tales – we were there together for all of it. I think we gave each other grace even then.
Do you know what I love most? It is that time does not dull the memory, but it does indeed change the perspective. We can now laugh at a lot of the things we did not find remotely humorous fifty years ago!
Like life itself, though, reunions are bittersweet.
We have lost several classmates, at least one in Vietnam, a few to cancer, one in an automobile accident.
We have had our share of triumphs and tragedies. At our ten year reunion, we were eager to give the impression of success and happiness. By the time the twentieth rolled around, real life had hit a few of us with enough disappointments that nobody tried to impress anybody else.
No masks.
No plastic smiles.
Instead we let ourselves tell the truth to those friends who had known the best and the worst about us for far too many years to worry those affections would end simply because a marriage had ended, a business had failed, or a child had ended up in rehab. It just felt authentic and comfortable and very safe.
Maybe that is a perk of maturity.
We begin to count our wealth by relationships instead of titles and financial statements.
However, I do wonder just a little how we are all preparing for June 5. Are we pulling out the 1969 Indian Trails yearbook to see just how much we have changed in fifty years?
I wonder if the guys are thinking of creative ways to comb their hair so that the bald spots are minimized. Actually, by now, we girls are probably doing some of that as well! A few extra minutes at the gym? A diet? How can we put our best foot forward?
Who knows? But this I do know. It won’t matter. We will meet and greet and be oh-so-happy to be together again. We will still love each other - hair, no hair, gray hair, or no gray hair thanks to a magic potion of hair color! Size 2 or size 16? That won’t matter either.
Author Jon Katz said, “Friends are part of the glue that holds life and faith together. It is powerful stuff.”
Friendship has to be one of God’s greatest blessings to us. The apostle Paul nailed that thought in I Corinthians 13 when he said, “Now abide faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
