30 Years

I swore a long time ago that I wouldn't go to a class reunion. I hated high school - I was so shy, wore glasses and had braces, and liked to read - all things that painted a target on my back that said "geek - please ignore".

I didn't go to my 10th, or my 20th (nobody even bothered to contact me for the 20th, and for the 10th, they asked me to come 2 days prior to the reunion). So when I heard about the 30th, I figured that no way wasw I going to subject myself to feeling like a geeky girl with braces and glasses again.

But I live an hour away from my home town now (during the summer), and I've changed so much since then. If I can charm a room full of Egyptians, or Greeks, or Canadiens, or Maltese, why can't I do the same for people I haven't seen for 30 years?

I spent all day Saturday getting ready. I colored my hair, put on fake nails, flattened my hair, and put on an outfit I last wore in Miami for a conference. I stopped by my brother's house to say hi and goodbye to my niece who was visiting, and the girls told me that my thong was showing through my white pants. Horrors.

So I went home and changed clothes (it was raining anyway, and my white pants would have been ruined). I drove an hour in the rain to my hometown, and arrived at my brother's house, where I would spend the night or not. I still thought that I would duck out early and drive back to the lake if I hated it.

I drove downtown to the park and searched for my classmates. I was clutching my senior class yearbook, thinking that maybe someone would recognize me. Once I found them, the game was on. I plastered the smile on my face, and said "nice to see you" so many times I thought I might die. Especially since I didn't recognize hardly anybody from their class pictures, which I had studied for several weeks before the event.

The boys - well, a lot of them lost their hair, and some gained a bit of weight. The girls though, they pretty much looked the same - hairstyles have changed, and some lost weight, or gained a couple of pounds from babies, but really, they looked the same.

And the cutest guy in the class? Well, he's still cute. He still has his hair, but it's gone all white now. He still has the build of the football player he once was, and has the scar on his arm from the sports-related accident he had our senior year.

We've lost one classmate to death, in a grain elevator accident. Another one might be in trouble with the law, but nobody has heard from him in a few years. Amongst my former classmates there was an accountant, finance director in a plastic manufacturing company, farmers, truck drivers, window manufacturing workers, housewives, teachers, and rancher.

Someone said that our class was nothing special, but that was okay. I beg to differ - almost all of us survived , and several of our classmates have had 20 or 30 year marriages, with kids and grandkids to show for it. And while no one was rich or famous, we all seemed happy...at least for one special night in the park 30 years after high school.