November 2, 2011 -- Who Says You Can’t Go Back?

As we go through our lives we have the opportunity to make each stage the best time. Ultimately, we fail in doing so for whatever reason, good or bad. It is often the case that we don’t even realize that what we are experiencing ends up being the best that we will ever experience. The hope is that it always gets better, but there are never any guarantees.

For many, the time that they spend in high school is as good as it gets. It may be the Prom Queen or the star quarterback, but what they experience during those four years never gets any better. High school for me was a good time, but hardly the ultimate. I enjoyed it, found it challenging and had some experiences that I will never forget. But it was never going to be the end all for me and luckily it hasn’t been.

The reason that I have broached this topic is that I attended my 40th high school reunion last month and with it brought back many wonderful memories. When I signed up, I was hoping that I would get to spend some time with the people that I was closest to during my stay at Chaminade. For the most part, those were the people that I had gone to elementary school with. However, as the date was getting closer, I became more and more disappointed with the fact that none had signed up to attend the dinner on Saturday night.

I was resigned to the fact that I would spend about an hour and a half at the dinner, eat my rubber chicken and then take off. You have to understand that I am not the social butterfly that Julia is. She can walk into a room of 50 people that she has never met and walk away Facebook friends with half of them. I am okay in my select crowd, but get me in a group that I am unfamiliar and I immediately become a wall flower.

Understand that I knew most of these guys 40 years ago, but I really didn’t spend much time with them outside of class. The evening started slowly as I was just being casually involved in a few three- and four-way conversations, but then I started to gather some speed and actually engaged in some one-on-one’s. Before long it was dinner and I was ready to make an evening of it. Amazingly the food was good and the conversation better.

I ended up talking with Dave Trainor quite a bit. Dave and I spent a good deal of time in classes together but probably spent even more time playing euchre before school and during lunch. I had contacted Dave before the reunion by email and talked him into coming. He felt that if I could make it from Phoenix, he could make it from Wisconsin.

Gary Geisel and I took virtually every class together as freshmen but rarely spoke. At the reunion, we probably talked for 20 minutes about his love of chasing his ancestry which was probably 15 more minutes than we had talked in high school.

Fred Limbert and I had a long conversation during the evening where we shared our views on everything from his gayness to our mutual love of children. Fred was an interesting character in high school who many of us felt might be gay, but it wasn’t the thing to do or even talk about at an all-boys high school in the late sixties and early seventies.

By his own admission, Fred was probably the last to know that he was gay. Like many, he struggled with it before he realized that it was who he was and has made a wonderful life with his partner of 25 years as they have raised three wonderful children Again, I spent more time talking to Fred than the four years that we spent together as teenagers.

Amazingly, I was becoming the social butterfly that I never was in high school. I was never a leader, just a follower and content to hang with the guys I was most familiar with. It was great to spend time with people that I knew only briefly, it seems, to find that they had become interesting, diverse people.

Herb Schwendeman and I had passed a few emails back and forth before the reunion as he and his wife Betty were part of the committee that threw this all together. It seems that I wasn’t the only one with a bit of a cancer scare as Herb went through the same thing earlier in the year and is doing well. As we shared insights and strategies in our emails, I looked forward to reconnecting at the reunion as again; Herb and I were not particularly close while at Chaminade.

If you remember, I used some of Herb’s thoughts in my last blog about faith and hope. We spent a good deal of time in conversation that night as I was the last to leave. Sometimes it just takes a while to understand who your friends are and I think that Herb and I will remain close for the rest of our time on this earth. Herb has a wonderful insight that is far deeper than I ever tread and it is one that has given me some new thoughts on who I am and how I can fight this disease in ways other than food and medicine.

In the end, I had a great time and I’m already looking forward to the next time we can get together when we all turn 60. Lord, that is a humbling thought. I remember when I thought that 40 was old.

What really struck me during the reunion is how superficial we can be at that age. Hanging around with Gary or Fred or even Herb was not something that I would have done in high school. I have always been a believer that people don’t change much in their lives, but maybe I need to rethink that a bit. Maybe we become more alike as we mature and the superficial differences in high school become just that, superficial. Or maybe I changed a bit.