In a couple of weeks, M. l'O and the girls and I will head out for our summer vacation. This year, it's been scheduled largely around his and my 20th high school reunions, which were fortunately scheduled a week apart in states not too distant from one another. So we'll head to New England for his, and then we'll head to the mid-Atlantic for mine. And we'll get to spend a week with his parents and my father and stepmother; so it's all about family and nostalgia and friends.
Perhaps because I'm taking a moment to catch my breath -- usual end-of-the-semester chaos, followed by big-huge-faculty-development workshop, followed by get-my-promotion-dossier-in -- I'm thinking concretely ahead to the 20th reunion in a way that I haven't since various classmates starting finding me on Facebook and talking about the reunion 9 or 10 months ago. I haven't seen more than one person from my graduating high school class since about 1990 -- and that one person has been my friend since we met on the first day of second grade, in September, 1978 -- it's going to be pretty bloody surreal. (Facebook contact doesn't really mitigate that. But I'll confess that the surreality is part of what I'm looking forward to.)
But for most of high school I was closer friends with people in the class of '90 than in my own class, and so in many ways I'm also just plain sad that I won't be seeing them along with my own classmates in three weeks. It somehow doubly weird, as a result: I'll be seeing a bunch of people who I last saw 20 years ago and, on top of that, I'll be looking around for a bunch of people who are perpetually linked in my mind with that bunch, wondering why they aren't walking into the room.
Comments