Twenty Years Out

I know you're probably thinking this must be a very recent photo but in fact, this was taken twenty years ago when I was about to graduate from high school.  Okay, no need to point out that I've aged a bit since this time.

This past weekend I attended my twenty year high school reunion. Not only did I attend my reunion, but I tried to help orchestrate conversation about it and get people there.  I could never quite completely throw myself into planning stuff though because it didn't feel quite right to me.  Let me explain.

I attended this school my junior and senior years of high school. I was raised in a religious community where it was common for high school students to attend boarding schools, of which this was one. My family had just moved to Virginia and I literally did not know a soul, aside from my brother.  (But bear in mind that at that time in my life, my brother and I could barely go twenty minutes without threat of ripping each other's throats out.)  So I had no friends and was away from all of the family that I actually got along with.   

I think the high school years are likely a challenging time for anyone but I found those two years to be particularly challenging.  Maybe time has exaggerated things in my memory but I think that I always felt like a bit of an outsider.  Most of my classes were with the same group of kids and I had few friends in that group.  In hindsight I realize it was probably just circumstances - I came late to the party and friendships had long since been established. Many of these people had known each other since childhood.  And I wasn't exactly putting myself out there.  I was scared. I avoided most extracurricular activities.  There has been no other time in my life when I struggled to connect with people, in the same way that I struggled those two years.  Perhaps if my parents had been around they could have nudged me in the direction I needed to go, but they weren't.  I got through those years but I did not love everything about it.  Having said that, I think it was a great experience for me and I learned a lot about life during that time.  Plus I did have some great friends and we had many, many good times.  But yeah, those years weren't as much fun as say, pretty much any other years in my youth. 

So skip ahead twenty years to where I find myself in the thick of things trying to help get the ball rolling on this reunion event.  I'm not exactly why I decided to attend the reunion, let alone help plan it.  I've not been very good about staying in touch with my friends from that time. I didn't know if any of them would be attending - although I do think I got involved in hopes that they *would* attend.  But whatever the reason, I decided to try to help get this thing organized.

Meanwhile, I discovered that I had a little spot of cancer on my head which needed to be removed.  I've had many things removed by a dermatologist and this is like the best possible cancer you could possibly get (it's pretty much harmless) so I was not expecting it to be a big deal.  Uh, wrong.  This is how I looked like two days after the procedure (note that I'm putting a link and not embedding an image because for other squeamish people, such as myself, this is not a pleasant photo).  My eye was swollen and then my cheek puffed up right into my peripheral vision.  Eventually both my eyes turned a lovely shade of reddish purple. It was quite impressive.

About a week after that, my kids started getting sick one at a time - very sick.  We're talking high fevers, projectile vomit and all sort of unpleasantness that lasted for numerous days.  Those last two weeks before the reunion, I literally had a sick child at home every single day.  My free time all go sucked up by that.  So I didn't get around to some of the stuff I had planned to do like put together a slideshow of photos from back then and perhaps even scan pictures from our old yearbook.  In fact, when I went to look for the yearbook from our senior year, it was nowhere to be found.  I have yearbooks from every other year but that one has gone missing.

On the day of that we were supposed to drive to my old school, there were tornado warnings and ridiculous rain storms.  Dwight and I got drenched stopping by Costco to fill up the gas tank and pick up cookies for the reunion. 

But we made it to our hotel safely.  We watched a bad movie on TV and then went to bed.  I was looking forward to a night of interrupted sleep after dealing with sick kids for the past two weeks.  Well, guess who woke up in the middle of the night, having apparently contracted the same bugs my kids had had?!  Seriously?!  But by mid-morning I was feeling better and around noon I finally felt well enough to venture out and visit for a bit.  Armed with hand sanitizer, I definitely enjoyed reconnecting with former classmates - albeit briefly.

Two of the people that helped me survive those years

By about 8 pm, I was spent.  That's pretty crazy because ordinarily I'm a night owl but not this night.  So we said our farewells and headed back to our hotel, where I promptly dropped my Fitbit into the toilet.  Luckily it was a clean toilet but still, that was NOT cool.

So, I'm left wondering what just happened:  I got an incision on my face, all four of my kids got very sick, I lost my senior yearbook, I got rained on, I got sick and I dropped my Fitbit in the toilet. Am I forgetting anything? Was I maybe not meant to attend that reunion and more importantly do I dare attend the next one?