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I have to say that the 20 was way better than the 10.  It seems that most everyone is finally over themselves and just being normal adults, LOL!  At the 10, the cheerleaders still hung with the cheerleaders, band with band and so on.  I was guilty of that too.  This time I really wanted to make an effort to mingle.  It seemed everyone else did too!  Sometimes I was even approached by people saying, “I really don’t remember you, but how’s it going?”  I found myself doing the same. I even told a guy that I didn’t really hang out with in high school that I remembered he was my first slow-dance as a freshman!  It made for a very fun and interesting evening. The family picnic the next day was great too.

Being from a small town that has a very large draw for the 4^th of July, my old High School has a standing yearly event on July 3^rd at the golf course clubhouse that they call ‘All Class Reunion’.  It is great to go to, just to see who else is in town from other years before and after (since most people have friends outside of their grad class).   And there was the current mayor, an alumni just like me, hanging out with the rest of us.

The 8^th grade reunion brought the biggest surprises.  These are people that I went from K-8^th with in a private school.  I was a picked-on child, the one who cries easily, the youngest in the class – so a big target for that age group.  But I did have my best friend and years of distance to put it all in perspective and I was curious how everyone else turned out.  Here are some interesting things I learned:

1) No one ever remembers things the way you do.

2) Boys only remember how boys treated them, and the same with girls.  Girls who were mean to me, were thought of as nice or never given any thought at all by the boys.  Boys that I thought were nice and smart were perceived as snooty to the other boys.

3) Whereas I think back on myself as awkward and shy, yet a total spaz with a weirdness bent, one guy whom I barely know or remember, told me that he always admired my energy and creativity. He didn’t think I was strange, just enthusiastic.

4) Everyone thinks they were alienated, even if you thought they were the popular one (weird, isn’t it?).

5) The boy who always played jump rope with us girls at recess actually turned out to be gay and has a really nice life-partner now that he brought to the reunion and I had the pleasure to meet. LOL!

6) Out of 30-odd kids in our class, we have classmates who now live in London, Japan and Costa Rica.  We have one Lawyer, one Cinematographer in Hollywood, one Doctor, one world-class chef, one College Professor publishing his dissertation, a High School philosophy teacher, a couple of CEOs, an inventor/entrepreneur (me), and one in the Pentagon working under the chief of staff for the Air Force!  Wow!  What a class!

I think about all this and I wonder how I can impart any of this perspective to my children as they enter grade school this year?  How will I comfort them when they come home crying because ‘everyone hates me’ (as I often did)?  What words of wisdom can I give that will actually be helpful?  Or do we all need to go through this fire to temper ourselves into adulthood? 

Is the only thing I can do is like my mother did – hold them close, kiss away their tears, and tell them how wonderful they are and that someday people will see that? Then stand back and let time do its work?  My Mother’s method seemed lame and totally unhelpful at the time when I was a child.  But in the end, everything turned out all right, just like she said it would. Hmm...