This past weekend, I attended one of the events (the most informal one) of my Ten Year High School Reunion. 23 of the 48 (two were not present during that photo posted above) showed up for the informal happy hour, some of whom I haven’t seen in ten years. It was so lovely to see everyone and I wished more of our class showed up.
There’s a popular notion that people show up to their reunion hoping to upstage old bullies and indulge in delicious schadenfreude. I’m pretty confident that our reunion was nothing like that. Everyone looked even better or the same as I remember them ten years ago. Cute and awkward girls have blossomed into glowing women. Everyone hugged all in attendance as soon as she arrived. It was a heartwarming experience and felt something like coming back to an old home.
The reunion reminded me that as a class and in comparison to preceding and succeeding classes, we were misfits. A perfect illustration of our class’s personality involves a Halloween tradition our high school had. We were a school for Pre-K through 12th grade. Every year for Halloween, the high school classes each had a hallway to decorate so that the Pre-K through 4th graders could parade through in their costumes. Normally, the hallways were decorated with the usual G-rated Halloween decorations. Ghosts and witches and scarecrows. During our sophomore year, our class decorated our hall as if it was a mental institution. We had REDRUM splattered in red on white walls and a stretcher with a classmate laying on it with her intestines hanging out. I remember we pulled a blanket over the intestines for the super young kids. We had lullabies playing and a strobe light flickering. We had girls muttering to themselves in wigs and grabbing kids from under the stretcher.
Needless to say, we broke the tradition after all the angry phone calls from parents.
We were a handful and I love the memories.
I know it’s impractical because of all the states we span (though a big chunk of us live in Houston, Dallas, Austin!), but I wish we didn’t wait ten years to reunite.