Things I learned at my high school reunion

At my 35th high school reunion. Photo by the waitress.

We spend our teen-age years lamenting, or denying, our families’ dysfunctions. We yearn for a “normal” adolescence.

By the time we reach our 35^th high school reunion, as I just did, we might as well accept we all came from dysfunctional families. The only thing normal is that there is no “normal.”

Or, as my wife says, we put the “fun” in dysfunctional.

This tends to take the pressure off reunion weekend. There’s little need to pretend anymore we’re someone we’re not. The expanding midriffs and receding hairlines tell truths we can’t mask.

That, and Facebook has punctured the façade of reconnecting under pretenses of who we are. We keep up with one another between personal visits, so we don’t have to spend time rehearsing false scripts of our true identities. 

Congregations often tell me they like that their church feels like a family. I sometimes think, “Are you sure you want to take on all the stuff that comes with being a family?”

At my class reunion, it struck me that high school classmates really are like a family. You don’t get to choose your siblings, and you don’t get to choose your classmates, unless you transferred in because a crosstown coach coveted your jump shot, or you went to private school.

You just get your locker assignments and make the best of things. 

After 35 years, I look back on my high school years as one part “Glee,” one part “Friday Night Lights,” and one part “Dead Poets Society.”  

Thirty-five years beyond graduation, we celebrate this shared heritage. 

In the decades since, some of us have found God, others lost our way. We’ve hooked up, broken up, hurt and healed. We’ve been hired and fired. Whether we have children or grandchildren is a present-day demarcation, just as in high school our differences were marked by who could sing or run or pass or who was popular.

Some of us have our health. Some don’t. 

Some of us are living the dream. Some not.

But we are a family 35 years on. Back then, we often hid the selves we really were in favor of presenting ourselves as something better.

Now, we can relax. This is who we are. 

If high school is like a musical, then it’s fitting the tune swirling through my head as I drove away from my reunion was the final song from Wicked as Glinda sings to Elpheba:

“I've heard it said

That people come into our lives for a reason

Bringing something we must learn

And we are led

To those who help us most to grow

If we let them

And we help them in return

Well, I don't know if I believe that's true

But I know I'm who I am today

Because I knew you ...

Who can say if I've been changed for the better?

But because I knew you

I have been changed for good.”