And in the middle of this bustle of activity, I spent 24 hours (literally almost to the minute) traveling to Dallas for a reunion. And not just any reunion...my 8th grade reunion. Yes friends, it's been 20 years since I was a geeky Catholic schoolgirl and no, I don't still have the plaid skirt or cardigan sweater hanging around.
Six months ago, I wouldn't have dreamed I'd be hanging out with people I hadn't seen since the pre-teen years. But now, I wouldn't have missed it for the world.
There's something very healing to both the mind and heart to pick back up with people who knew you way back when. For the 50 in our class, we had a special bond. We traveled to retreats and on class trips together. We were reprimanded by the priest after church for some reason we don't really remember why. We played sports together, choreographed dance routines for PE class and got all decked out for our graduation. We had crushes on our classmates, and they had crushes on us...and some of us didn't discover who crushed on who until decades later.
Some of us were at the school all 9 years...some only middle school and others like me, just 8th grade. But on reunion night, we were all the same. We shared the memories that had come flooding back over months of emails and Facebook posts preparing for the gathering. We made new memories getting to know the adult versions of each other. No matter if someone was your best friend or you barely spoke to them back then, now we welcomed each other with open arms.
While many people I know were surprised I'd go to all this trouble for an 8th grade reunion, several of my classmates remarked that for them, these were the people they'd developed the real bonds with, even if they hadn't kept in touch since. Think about it: we all split and went to different high schools. We split even further for college. We now live all over the country. Even if we'd developed close friends in HS, those nasty hormones that hadn't taken full effect yet in our early teens tended to get in the way in the later years. Colleges may have reunions, but you rarely get the chance to get the friends you spent time with together again. This is the one cohort that is small enough for us to pull a gathering like this off and for it to have meaning.
So for one night, we relived "The Promise" we made 20 years ago: "When you need a friend...I'll always be there." And we got to feel "Forever Young" again ... and I've been jamming out to the 80s new wave almost non-stop since, just to hang on to that feeling a little longer.
Maybe that's how I've made it through the 10 days since. It's like I found a small fountain of youth to re-energize me, and I can't wait to visit it again in 5 years. Go Mustangs!
