Sam Barlow High School Class of 1996 Reunion

August 23rd, 2006

So it's time for that event of all events, that great pinnacle of early adulthood, the moment we've all been waiting for.... my ten-year high school reunion. A deliberate reunion of people who once were idiots and didn't know it, and who are now idiots and do know it, has to be one of the most complex emotional issues to face humanity, ever. Some people loved high school and hate the thought of growing old; others loved school but would rather leave the past dead and buried in the yearbooks. I suppose I'm in the middle. I had a lot of good experiences at Barlow High. I also spent a lot of fruitless hours during that period trying to be happy and achieving exactly the opposite. In fact, I don't believe I knew how to maintain a stable emotional and intellectual state until about the age of twenty-three or twenty-four. And that was only after graduating from college, getting married and having children. (You might wonder what raising children has to do with a stable emotional state: I wonder too sometimes).

I'm starting to realize that adults on the whole discount their pre-adult life. I look back and just laugh out loud at the things I did (and didn't) do in high school. That makes me wonder if those years were in a sense wasted, because I missed so many opportunities that are so obvious to me now. However, I think that viewing the past this way is faulty, and, in some sense, dangerous. When my someday-teenager approaches me with some issue that is so critical to him and seems like absolute nonsense to me, the wrong response would be to treat it lightly. "Perception is key" as my high school debate coach Wayne Gessford preached to us countless times. The tumultuous emotional whirlpool of teenagerhood is nearly incomprehensible ten years later, but the reaction of parents to that swirl of froth and glitter has real consequences throughout the child's life.

I've noticed that when I visit my parents' home, I take on the role I had when I was their dependent. I think going to the high school reunion will be like that, only without the chocolate chip cookies and milk. I'll show up and see all these people whom I barely remember (but once considered lifelong friends) and find myself cast again into that same role I had in high school: the same social structure, the same friends. I mean, how do you walk up to someone who made your life miserable at every opportunity, and shake their hand and say, gosh it's nice to see you again? On the other hand, all those old enmities and alliances have no bearing on who I am today, or who we've all become as a group. So who cares? Just relax and be who you are now, not who you were then. Somehow I think that's more easily said than done. There has to be a part of your emotional memory that registers all those people in their proper place, just as they were when you walked off the auditorium stage with your diploma and out into the night of the world.

Perhaps the shock of seeing my classmates ten years older will awaken some sense of pity in me, allowing me to discard my high school memories and live in the today we've all become. There's a certain beauty and naivete (yes, I can say that now, even about those world-savvy teenagers) that accompanies youth. We've definitely lost that. Now it's been replaced by something else. Something different for everyone: disappointment, success, complacency, in all measures and mixes.

So here's to me, my high school class of 1996, and to our future.