I hated high school. No, that actually isn’t an accurate statement. I hated the way I felt about myself in high school--inadequate and inconsequential. Some of that is on me, but some of it is on a large percentage of my classmates.
In high school, I wasn’t pretty, I wasn’t smart, and I wasn’t athletic. I was a socially awkward poor farm kid in a school full of kids whose parents were doctors and IBMers. I was a have-not in a school of haves. I wasn’t bullied so much as I was ignored. I didn’t even blip on the radar of the cool kids, but if I did blip for them, I became a target of condescension or ridicule.
I’m not saying I don’t have fond memories of my high school years. I had a core group of very good friends, and we had a lot of good times together. But, we were half a dozen in a class of almost 500, so it was easy for the haves to just not see us--me--on a daily basis.
Captain went to a smaller, rural school where it just wasn’t possible to be ignored. In his class of under 100 kids, he knew everybody and everybody knew him. When we were flipping through our yearbooks once long ago, he could tell me at least one tidbit of information about not only every kid in his class, but just about every kid in the yearbook.
On that background comes the story. We graduated high school 30 years ago now, which means there were class reunions. I have never once been to one of my reunions for a variety of reasons. In the first few go-rounds, we couldn’t afford it (remember, I went to the school of haves). On top of that, my core group of friends got together as a group once or twice a year anyway. But the crux of it was, I didn’t like 95% of my classmates in high school so why would I pay good money to mingle with people I never liked and had nothing in common with.
This year, Captain encouraged me to finally go. He was working that night, so I went by myself only because I knew that some of my good friends would be there. After 30 years, you’d think we would all be on an even playing field. We have all gotten older, gained a little weight or lost a little hair, have had good things happen, and have had bad things happen. Apparently the lines of cool and not cool never blur because, of the 60 classmates there, no one mingled outside of their clique. The cheerleaders sat at one table, the jocks were at another table, and the yuppies were at yet another table. Then there was the table of me and my friends.
Again, some of that is on me because, while none of the other groups made an effort to mingle with me, neither did I make any kind of effort to mingle with them. It was a self-defense mechanism because I just didn’t want to take the chance of being ignored again or made to feel any of the things I felt in high school. That’s sad. I’m sure there are some very nice people in those other groups. Not everyone hangs on to the...identity, I guess...that they had in high school. Still...making the effort wasn’t worth the chance that they hadn’t changed.
In contrast, a month after my reunion, we went to Captain’s 30-year reunion, and we had a blast. It was a smaller group--less than 30 people--but everyone talked with everyone, and not just the small talk kind of thing. Classmates sat down together, exchanged stories about work, spouses, and children. There were even two people there who went to school with Captain for a lot of years but had moved away and actually graduated from different high schools. Seriously, how wonderfully inclusive is that? That says “You were important to us.”
At one point while Captain was off with classmates swapping stories, I sat with the spouses at a table, and we had the nicest conversation even though we only ever see each other every five years.
I have always enjoyed Captain’s reunions for the simple fact that these people--who didn’t know me back when--have always, without fail, made me feel welcome. Always.
Part of that may be that I have part of this community now for 27 years, but I think it’s more than that. I think a lot of it was because they grew up in a small community where status didn’t mean as much as it did in the large urban school I graduated from. Maybe I still would been something of an outsider if I’d been Captain’s classmate, but I don’t think so. I do know I wouldn’t have been ignored.
At this stage of my life when I gotten past what a friend of Captain’s calls “the brain dead genius years” of young adulthood when everything is black or white with no gray areas, I have found that the bottom line is I don’t care about a person’s race, color, religious preference, gender, sexual orientation, or political affiliation. If someone is nice to me, I will be nice to them. That’s it. It really is that simple.
So here’s to the PIHS class of ‘85. Thank you for welcoming me from the beginning and making me one of your own. K/A, folks.
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