A Decade of Adulthood

October 15th, 2006

This last weekend I drove down to Portland for my ten year high school reunion. About a hundred people attended from a graduation class of around 350. Not surprisingly, I didn't know about a third of the people who attended. The night before the reunion, Josh pulled out our yearbook and we attempted a last minute cram session to refresh our memories on names and faces. Most of the people looked familiar, but the only ones who hold any meaning now are those with whom I can remember a shared memory: a class taken, activities done together.

The day of the reunion, Adam, Josh and I drove down to the high school and had the good fortune of finding the school open for a regional debate tournament. We roamed the hallways, sneaking into rooms that held memories of classes and teachers we remembered. In the band room, we noticed that the plaque with Adam's name on it had fallen off the wall. After digging around a bit, we found it lying on top of a cabinet. It felt like we had unearthed an archeological artifact. Adam left a note on the whiteboard (it would have been a blackboard in our day) to petition the teacher to reinstate his memorial.

The organizer of the reunion had orchestrated a couple of prizes for such things as who had traveled farthest to attend the reunion (a couple from British Columbia, though I'm positive my friend Adam from Utah should have received that one). I won the prize for the person with the most actual or prospective children (two born, one on the way). Embarassingly, the reward for such productivity was a box of contraceptives, presumably a suggestion that enough is enough!

See all the photos from the reunion by clicking here.