Reminiscing

I've mentioned the class reunion coming up. As that time nears, I'm starting to feel a little stressed, but that's my personality on wanting everything to be picture perfect. I'm working on letting that go.

I did get my yearbooks out last weekend - an old friend from school who has remained a family friend for 30 years came over and we were discussing the reunion, etc. It was great fun to look at the yearbooks, and I've done so over and over, because everytime I look at them I'm remembering something I'd either totally forgotten or realizing something I'd never noticed, can't decide which on that. But it has been fun remembering people and updating on what we know about who.

One of the inevitables is that a lot of our folks have shuffled off this mortal coil in the last 30 years. In fact, just last week, two persons I remember well passed. One of them no word on what happened, not even a funeral service. On the other, we heard it was a heart attack. Kinda scary, but given our age, very probable, and especially given that heart disease is the leading cause of death among women, mostly because we think we're not the ones.

One thing I have rather enjoyed is this - looking at the pictures of us in those great 70's clothes and hair styles, earth shoes, wide belts and ties - well - in our faces you could see the future. I can still remember how it felt to be 17 or 18 and have the whole world laid out in front of me and feel like nothing was impossible. That feeling is why we go back, why we have reunions, and why we try to remember everyone and everything from those days - it's to recapture the way we were before the world's reality set in. Now don't get me wrong here, I'm not on a downer at all, I'm just saying there is a time of innocence that we find ourselves longing for, if only for a moment, now and then.

And, while everything may not be picture perfect that night in my mind's eye, if each of us can catch up with an old friend, laugh, remember those days with a warm heart and sincere smile, then we'll have had great success. I just can't wait!!