Posts Tagged ‘high school reunion’
Reunion Tales
Now that I’ve had a whole day of not going anywhere, life feels faintly familiar to the norm to which I have grown accustomed. Cyndie drove to the cities to visit her mom, so I had a quiet day with Asher. We went for a walk after breakfast and then took a nap when we got back to the house. It’s going to take me a couple of days to pay back the sleep debts I accrued last weekend.
The highlight for today is going to be a visit from two of Cyndie’s classmates who heard plenty of stories about our property. I wish we could host all the people who show a sense of wonder and interest when we describe our place. It is rarely a convenient opportunity for most people, so we are thrilled that this particular time it appears to have worked out just a couple of days later.
I got permission to share a story of Cyndie’s from an interaction at her class reunion. She was looking forward to talking with a guy whom she remembered had poked fun at her buck-tooth and thick-glasses appearance when they were young. The memory had always seemed curious to her because the guy was the only other particularly noticeably buck-toothed, thick-glasses kid in her year.
Turns out that it wasn’t him. At least, he has no recollection of it and doesn’t think he would’ve ever done that. Now Cyndie is questioning her memory. Was it someone else teasing both of them, and she mistakenly placed it on the other victim? We’ll probably never know.
The eventual outcome is the best of results. The two of them ended up having a wonderful exchange and quickly bonded in their shared experience. I might add that he turned into as good-looking a guy as Cyndie did into a beautiful woman. They might not have even talked if it weren’t for this mysterious memory.
Happy surprises like this are one of several reasons I am a big fan of reunions.
I enjoyed reuniting with the horses yesterday. They don’t offer up grandiose gestures of being happy to have us return after several days’ absence like dogs do. Asher doesn’t hide much with that wagging tail, licking kisses, and leaning into us for scritches. No, the horses are much more subdued in their acknowledgment.
Swings just stood stationary when I put my face to her nose to exchange breath and stroke her neck. Staying put was her way of telling me she was happy to see me.
The amount of food I found spilled beside her bucket last evening was more than I’ve seen before. We need to start soaking her food to help her cope with failing teeth. Do they make dentures for animals? [not a serious question]
Moments after I took that picture, Mix moseyed over to eat most of what had been spilled.
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Older Faces
So, I accompanied Cyndie to her 50th High School Reunion yesterday after driving home from the lake at 5:30 in the morning through varying levels of fog. My poor brain is a little sleep-deprived and mixed up with rekindled memories from so long ago and seeing dozens of mostly recognizable faces that are decidedly older than how we all looked in 1976.
I tried to capture as much knowledge as I could grasp on the fly from the folks on their planning committee and classmates who had traveled from far and wide to use in planning next year’s reunion for my class.
In the end, I have a sense that there’s not all that much we can control in determining attendance at the event. It’s great seeing those who showed up, heartbreaking to see whose lives have ended, and sad to find out who didn’t make it for any number of reasons.
I dredged up images of the old rooftop faces of our schools in the 1960s from historical aerial photographs the University of Minnesota provides online.
The top photo above is the view of Central Elementary that eventually became our middle school. If I have my dates correct, in 1971, Cyndie’s and my class started the year at what was then the high school with grades 7-12. In the middle of the year, they moved us back to that elementary school that had become grades 6-7-8.
The bottom photo above is the view of our high school. I just looked at the satellite view on Google of the way our high school looks today. It has now become the middle school and has been significantly remodeled, but parts of the old core are identifiable.
The two main courtyards have been cut in half, so there are now four courtyards. It’s still possible to discern what the 100, 200, and 300 wings were, as they were called.
I’m feeling a little older today for some reason.
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Showing Age
It feels like a Saturday morning around here, for no obvious reason, especially since weekend days are rarely different than the rest of the week for us now that we have no employment responsibilities. The weather, the horses, the music we put on during breakfast; they all influence in some way, but I suspect it is something deeper in my unconscious.
I composed an email yesterday to kick off planning for my high school class’s 50th reunion next year. Funny, how it triggers recollections and reminisces of people and places from so many decades ago, even as I carry on with my current routines, tending to our property and animals with hands that look like an old man’s.
My long-term effort to use the winter accumulation of manure in the paddocks to create a rise over a drain tile is coming along nicely.
The horses haven’t paid much attention to it lately. Some years, there has been a lot more evidence of them messing around along the edges of the pile. I look forward to them doing that to break up the dried manure that rolls to the bottom, to mix it into the existing, predominantly clay, soil.
We are in a bit of a dry spell that has finally put an end to standing water in the low spots of our trails through the woods. It has also dried up Paddock Lake.
The horses have been working on expanding the borders by their antics of stomping and kicking around to get back up after they lie down in it. Their interest in it seems to disappear as fast as the water does.
They reached a fresh level of shedding over the last couple of days. This morning, we watched Mia pushing her butt so hard against the almost completely dead willow tree that it looked like it was going to topple over. She succeeded in scraping out massive clumps of hair.
A wild turkey gobbled in the distance, and the sun popped out for a few seconds between a sky full of thick clouds. The day seems like a Saturday with a mostly open agenda. A guy could go for a bike ride if he didn’t have a log home guy stopping by at some undetermined time to quote a wood maintenance project. Both the logs of the house and the log-looking siding on the shop garage are showing their age.
I can totally relate.
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Reunion Planning
A few posts back I was waxing nostalgic about the 70s and I think I failed to point out another aspect of my renewed interest in the good ol’ days. This coming summer will mark 40 years since my class graduated from high school in Eden Prairie, MN, and I have again volunteered to participate in planning our every-decade-whether-we-like-it-or-not event.
Some people loathe the idea of a high school reunion. I get that. I love class reunions, except for the part where I don’t get to visit with unique people I was fond of who don’t come because they loathe reunions.
There is also one other problem I have with reunions: The nights always wiz by in a blur that leaves me short of having talked in any depth with all of those who do show up.
I guess I could frame the missing classmates who skip out on the event as a positive, since that gives me fewer people to feel bad about not having had enough time to chat up by the end of the evening.
In my experience with reunions, like so many other things, the main event can tend to be anti-climatic. The preparation and anticipation are often where I get the most reward for time invested. A few of my life-long friends gathered last night for a planning meeting, and once again, I heard some hilarious stories from our youth. After all these years, I’m amazed there are still tales I’m hearing for the first time.
Plenty of them have me wondering how we ever survived the shenanigans.
Our planning committee has the significant details established. We settled on a date, location, and rough outline of a plan for the evening. The next biggest step is getting the word out. A decade ago, I pushed an attempt to reach every name on our list, which made for good adventure in sleuthing. Who doesn’t like a little game of following clues every once in a while?
Ten years later, I’m finding myself much less interested in playing. Maybe it is a result of seeing the futility of trying to reach people who loathe reunions. Why bother? It makes more sense to me now that we should direct our energy to those who want to come. All we need to do is make it easy for people to learn of our event.
We advertise.
I’m thinking we should try something like the zoo did with April the giraffe’s pregnancy. If you don’t know about April at this point, you are in the uninformed minority. (Google: April giraffe. I dare ya.)
We need to start with some outrageous objection to our reunion event that would cause it to be banned. Something salacious enough that news organizations would pick up on it and cause a stir. Then we resolve that, get the ban lifted, springboard off the attention with a GoFundMe campaign, and get some corporate sponsorship.
See why the planning part is so much fun?
Still, part of me really hopes some of my old classmates who have skipped every other reunion will discover an urge to come this time. We intend to make it easy to learn about our event for those people who choose to inquire.
Do your classmates a favor. Do the math yourself and every 10 years, check to see if your class is holding a reunion. Then tell the planners whether you will come or not. It’s a simple courtesy that I know will be greatly appreciated.
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Rewarding Progress
We started the day with some group exercise, walking the horses, in pairs, uphill and down, but the main event of the day yesterday was a divide and conquer effort on the ranch. I’d say we conquered. On top of that, we did so under a time constraint, because we had Cyndie’s 40th high school class reunion to attend for dinner back in our old stomping’ grounds an hour’s drive away.
My main goal was to tend to the manure composting area, which was getting overfull and in dire need of rotation. With time limited, we decided to just transfer a large portion of the old piles to a secondary storage location and dump them in one big pile for distribution later.
That plan led to selecting and preparing a new spot for a pile of (mostly) composted manure. The place we settled on, near Cyndie’s wild flower garden on the north side of our driveway, was all tall grass and weeds. We are a little sensitive about weeds right now, and I did intend to eventually knock down the growth in the pasture area over there, so my focus suddenly shifted to using the diesel tractor and the brush cutter to mow the entire area.
That’s a big project, and more than I planned to bother with at that time.
Cyndie volunteered to take on relocating the piles of manure on her own while I mowed —no small task— and we were off. That area on the north side of the driveway has a lot of pine trees that create quite an obstacle course for the big tractor. It turns the project into a busy process of maneuvering, offering very little physical or mental rest in the tractor seat.
I only picked off one T-post along the fence line, and hit one large hidden rock, but the number of pine branches abused was too high to count. To her credit, Cyndie hit a grand slam of progress in moving ALL of the oldest piles from our composting area.
Delilah got the short end of things for the day, as we had little time to smother her with attention before serving her dinner in her kennel and hitting the road to visit our past. The reunion dinner was located a stone’s throw from our old Eden Prairie home, at the Bent Creek golf club.
I graduated a year after Cyndie, so I was attending as a spouse, but high school lasts 4 years with multiple grade classes, so I knew many of these people as well as I know my classmates. Some were neighbors from when I grew up, others were siblings of people in my class, so it was just as fun for me to visit and catch up with folks as it was for Cyndie.
I had an additional agenda to collect information from the planners and check the number of attendees to use as reference in planning the reunion for my own graduating class, next year at this time. The first meeting for our planning committee has just been scheduled to occur a couple weeks into August.
Holy cow, August starts tomorrow! My class reunion is just a blink away.
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Relative Something 