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This past weekend, I travelled back east and back in time to attend my 40^th high school reunion. It’s hard to believe I’ve been out of high school twice as long as it took to get through it… until, of course, I look in a mirror and see a slightly more tired version of my father staring back. Mentally, I feel just as energetic, vibrant, attractive and adventurous as a seventeen year old high school graduate, but physical reality
and fond memory are rarely passengers in the same car pool.

Don’t get me wrong: I wouldn’t trade the life I’ve led for a chance to start over today. My life has had its ups and downs, as every good life should, and while I might be tempted to enjoy some new peaks, I don’t believe I’d care to try for a whole new set of life’s low blows. So I approached this reunion knowing full well where life has brought me, what it has made of me and what I’ve made of it.

On the whole, I’m fairly pleased with what I’ve amassed: a wonderful wife of 29 years, two fine sons, my own small business, three beater cars, two sizeable mortgages, a few acres in the mountains for camping and a treasure trove of good friends and good memories.

As a seventeen year old, I never fathomed how life would change me or imagined where it would lead. A high school kid assumes he knows everything and uses the next sixty years (if he’s lucky) to disprove that theory. There is nothing like life to give you new perspective, and few things like a class reunion to hammer home that awareness.

I was especially excited to attend this reunion after the uncertainty of the past five years. An insurance company decided my life was a “pre-existing condition,” and a botched colon surgery and three subsequent surgeries to correct the botching pretty much emptied the bank account. The recession dried up much of my business just as I was diagnosed with a heart condition. The present was spinning, the future was sketchy, and the certainty of the past became more attractive.

I had a good solid childhood with Leave it to Beaver parents and Dennis the Menace friends, and my Catholic high school years were full of envelope-pushing rebellion against a common enemy: the Christian Brothers of Ireland. While the brothers (some notable good ones, but the majority, not so much) worked hard to teach us the boundaries of authoritarian obedience, my classmates and I struggled to learn common sense and self-expression. Going to this reunion, for me anyway, was the acknowledgment that independence and common sense had won the day and were to be celebrated.

So, I looked forward to revisiting high school: the touchstone of past solidity, a time in my life when I knew everything, when life had not yet frightened me, and when I had good solid friends there to back me up. With the present still a coin toss, I needed to see and feel the firmness of the bonds we created 40 years ago.

The day of the reunion arrived and after travelling back to Irondequoit, New York, I had the chance to reconnect with many of my old high school—and even some grammar school—friends. I didn’t get to spend a lot of time with any one of them, but heard lots of condensed elevator-speech versions of life stories that both echoed my own experience and showed the different roads we’d each plowed for ourselves. It was wonderful to see and hear how each had embraced the stranglehold of life.

Several members of our class formed a band to play at the reunion, and they regularly got together at a barn in Webster to work out a set. I was fortunate to join them on guitar and vocals, and we had a blast playing for our classmates. Several people came up after the set and said they didn’t know I could sing (I think the jury is still out…). Others asked, “When did you learn to play the guitar?”

My answer was, “Over the last forty years.”

The more I’ve thought about it, I realize that same answer, “over the last forty years,” applied to things my classmates have learned as well:

“When did you learn to fly a plane?” “When did you get so well-adjusted?” “When did you learn to run a business?” “When did you come out of your shell?” “When did you learn to cope with the death of a spouse?” “When did you become so generous?” “When did you get so damn smart?”  “When did you get the strength to overcome cancer?”

Or as one classmate put it, “When did we start looking at 58-year-old women and
talking about how HOT they are?”

Over the last forty years.

My classmates and I have all peaked at different times… some in high school, some in our 30’s or 40’s and some are just starting to peak now. Maybe I’ll peak when (if) I become a grandparent, I dunno. It’s exciting and reassuring that my peers have been successful, overcome the odds, braved things I wouldn’t think I had the guts to face.

It turns out we were not just linked for a brief four year moment in time. Each of our lives may not have been a big dish of pudding, but after forty years, we assembled and were there for each other as, in one way or another, we always have been. And that left me feeling pretty solid.

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