The e-mail appeared on my desktop a few weeks ago – a faintly recognizable name winking back up at me from the past.  It was an old high school classmate who I hadn’t seen or thought about in 40 years.  She had tracked me down to let me know that a class reunion was being planned for the hometown this summer, and to ask if I would be attending.

I was immediately flooded with the same combination of joy and dread that engulfs anyone about to attend a reunion - the joy of seeing familiar old faces, sharing stories and laughing at the impossibility of becoming so old so quickly, and the dread of the inevitable comparisons:  How have I aged?  What will they think of me?  Has my life amounted to a hill of beans?  

In high school we prided ourselves on being so unique, so different from one another.  But in retrospect, we were all so very much alike.  Despite the steaming cauldron of political and social events that defined the late 1960’s – assassinations, urban riots, campus unrest and the Viet Nam war – surprisingly little of it seemed to find its way into the lessons and discussions in our classrooms.  For the most part, our world revolved, not around real world events, but around the various social and athletic pursuits that defined our sphere.  Given the size and shape of the larger world, our experiences were almost identical. 

We were a small subset of life that accurately defined exactly what it meant to grow up in THAT place at THAT time.   Following graduation, our class exploded like a supernova – sending energized fragments in every direction, and into every profession.   Some burned brightly.  Some were simply never seen again.        

When we reassembled at the 10-year reunion, we were full of wild stories, but most of us had gotten the what-I’m-gonna-be-when-I-grow-up out of our systems and had reluctantly moved on to Plans B, C or D.   By the 20-year reunion, there was a certain resignation and comfortability with what we had become.   And by the 30-year, it was difficult enough just recognizing the faces. 

Forty years have now passed since that star exploded.  And as I look back through my yearbooks, the thing that strikes me most is how little I really knew many of those people.  Even though they have all gone on to entire lifetimes of experiences, experiences of which I know little to nothing about, they are forever crystallized in my mind as small black and white photos of goofy kids with bad haircuts.  It is then that I realize that, despite all the impossible changes that my life has been through, that’s exactly how they remember me.  

And therein lies the key.  The beauty of this whole experience is that, for one magical evening, we can simultaneously exist in the past, the present and the future.  We can return to our primordial past with those with whom we shared it.  From that vantage point, we can then zoom ahead to discover how it all turned out.  And all the while we can marvel in the present, this one remarkable night when we can walk around a room staring into the wrinkled and graying faces of strange old men and women, searching out the twinkling eyes and innocent laughs of kids we once knew.  

We, as a group, have now spent a near-lifetime defining the limits and limitations of what it meant to grow up in THAT place, at THAT time.  When one of us succeeds, in a sense, all of us succeed.  And when one of us feels as if they’ve spent 40 years doing nothing, it represents that part in all of us that HAS been sitting around for 40 years doing nothing.   Reunions and funerals are the only real chances we get to reset the clock, to get a fix on how far we’ve drifted since the tide last shifted, and to make sure we’re not leaking BS like a ruptured tanker. 

I am inescapably part of this subset, and it is part of me.  With this group, I can’t even lie about my age.  So, in the end, I’ll take what I’ve done – the winning and the losing - and head back to the hometown.   I’ll throw my life’s triumphs and humiliations into the mix and let the math work its magic.  We’ll add up our successes, subtract the failures, multiply by all of our experiences and divide by those of us who remain.  In the end, what we’ll end up with is a fair estimation of the limits and the limitations of what it really did mean to grow up in THAT place, at THAT time.

In the past, we always returned looking for the differences, but this time I’m going back to search out the similarities.  This time around I’m not going back to tell stories.  This time I’m going back to listen.