Partying Like It's 1986!

The main reason for the timing of my trip home in June was my 25 year high school reunion. It was incredibly special for me because it was literally the first time in more than two decades that I had seen most of my classmates.

 My class held two previous reunions at 5 and 10 years, and I missed both. At five, I was just out of college and still too intent on finding my own way to go back and visit a past I was trying to distance myself from. My 10 year happened the year I moved from Virginia Beach to Seattle, and things were just too chaotic to make time for a trip home. But this time, my life was stable, I knew about the event a year in advance thanks to our great planning committee and I was due for a trip home to Delaware. No excuses. And to tell the truth, I was actually looking forward to it.

The words "high school" and "reunion" in the same sentence can put fear in the heart of even the most confident person. If you dread reunions, it's because you see them as reminders of how much of your life is gone, of the dreams you had as a kid that went unrealized or of how much your physical appearance has changed in ways you don't like.

But reunions can also be a powerful reminder of how the people and experiences you had all those years ago shaped the person you are today for the better. Judy Adams, our class adviser, was one of those people.

She was part teacher and part mother to all of us. Her son Chris was a member of our class. Sadly, he's one of the friends we've lost over the years. I imagine seeing all of us was bittersweet for her in a way, but I'm so glad she came because our gathering would have seemed incomplete without her.

Living in a world with social tools like Facebook definitely helped take some of the anxiety out of getting reacquainted with people I hadn't seen in a long time. I was already connected with more than half of my classmates that attended, so I knew what they looked like now, what was going on in their lives and what their current interests were. There were still the occasional glances down at name tags before saying hello to people I didn't recognize, but the small talk got started a lot easier.

And the more I talked with people, the more I realized most of us hadn't really changed all that much. Our life experiences had just made us better versions of ourselves. And as the memories flooded back and friendships were re-established, it didn't matter how much time had passed, how much weight we'd gained or how we made a living.

All that mattered was that we were a class again. And if I do say so myself, 1986 was a really great year.