Thoughts from a Fifty-Year High School Reunion

How time flies.

As many of you know, I live in San Antonio Texas.

This morning I am sitting on the little balcony of my hotel room looking out over a practice putting green. Behind it are a few of the holes on the short course of Singing Hills Country Club, near El Cajon, California, inland from San Diego. I remember this course well, having been, thanks to my dad, a member during my high school years. I was on the high school golf team as were my two brothers. No, I wasn’t that good, but still, to have the last class of your day be nine holes of golf was an opportunity I could not resist.

Much has changed in fifty years, which is a pretty boring statement, and I would have left it out if it wasn’t so true. This balcony along with the hotel complex did not exist back then. Neither did the putting green I am looking over as I write. The swimming pool I and my family and friends used to swim in is gone but replaced by other pools spread around the enlarged facility.

The trees are pretty much the same, many of them still frustrating golfers due to their positions along one of the three courses that I am sure, like wagon trails of old, have pretty much retained their basic shapes and locations. Golf as a sport lends itself to that.

Olympic pools and basketball courts are the same all over the world. Not so with golf courses. It’s the man-made structures that constantly fall apart and need periodic demolition and reconstruction based on more current needs and tastes. Golf courses themselves simply need constant grooming, like the Garden of Eden apparently once did.

So, at least for me, it is fitting to be back at this memory-packed place and looking forward to tonight’s reunion party in a banquet hall just a short walk from here.

Last night there was a reception at a classmate’s home and I was able to see many I had not seen for fifty years. It would have been even stranger had we not, following high school graduation, lived through the Digital Revolution enabling us to reconnect to some extent on the Internet.

Now this fifty-year-reunion business is certainly new to me — which is another very lame sentence, but I’m afraid necessary to set up the thoughts that follow.

All who choose to walk into one of these things is stepping into a little adventure not knowing really how the whole thing will turn out. I have to believe our universal greatest fear is not connecting names and faces. This might be why many decide not to risk attending.

It also has to do with the important and difficult time in most of our lives we are returning to remember. It was fun and also a time we were glad to move past. The high school years for most people, who even had such a thing, are rough ones. They involve transitioning from childhood to adulthood, while going to school. And the older everyone gets, the more, when looking back at people that age now, we see them as the children we hated being identified as by our parents, grandparents, and other significant adults. Back then I think we all overcompensated for our feelings of inferiority and insignificance by telling ourselves and one another often to the point of true believer status, that we were more mature and enlightened than all those of older generations put together. After all, we had better music.

But that’s a brief moment in time that culminates with high school graduation just before each of us is dunked head first into the overwhelming and intimidating real world. Once again we are sent back, as we had as freshmen four years before, to the lowest rung of life’s never-ending ladder.

Now, fifty years later, we might briefly mention our occupations and future plans to others at such an occasion, but our general conversations are different than they probably were at a twenty- or thirty-year reunion. Who really remembers any more? However, by deduction, when having the same extremely short time to catch others up to what we have been doing in the last fifty years compared with earlier decades, we tend to diminish whatever it is we have done and focus more on our current interests and lives. These, as far as I can tell, and is true of me, have to do with others we care about.

Our futures and plans looking forward from now are no longer as different and original as our past career paths once were. Now we are beginning to see a commonality to what lies ahead and it is, once again, drawing old high school friends back together. This is  because growing old, although not for the faint of heart, seems to take a more common well-worn path. We are no longer the trailblazers we once might have thought ourselves as being.

Now our primary interests are others; our families and friends, old and current. We delight in having possibly raised a few children to adulthood without killing them and many are now talking like typical doting grandparents.

We agree on a few general statements. First we agree that we are all seventeen-year-olds locked in our grandparents’ bodies and we agree that the time blew by way too fast. And most of us are becoming settled on the idea that, unlike what we thought (and necessarily so to a great degree when we were graduating from Granite Hills our Alma Mater fifty years ago) this life, thankfully, is not about us.

We gladly make room, as all generations before us have, for new ones to be born and grow up as members of this amazing and quirky human race. We are ending our run with many of our class already having gone before us and my prayer is that we will continually remember our blessings - that we will be grateful for our parents, teachers, bosses, and one another who walked with us at critical points along the way, including all those difficult characters, who, each in his or her own unique way, taught us things I believe God wanted us to learn.

And with God now on my mind, I happen to personally believe that all of this life is just batting practice, or time at the driving range, and that there  is coming a time when we will continue what was started here.

There, reunions like this one, will simply be another day in paradise.

Photo by Courtney Cook on Unsplash