mikao's world

A Decade of Change

I got a call from my ten year high school reunion committee last week. Well, actually, my older sister got a call from them because they were able to track her down before me, and then she called me to let me know that they called, and then I got a call from them.

My ten year high school reunion won’t actually be until July 2006, but they’re contacting everyone now. "They" being two girls from my class who still live in the same town we grew up in. I think there were 32 graduates in 1996, from our Kindergarten through Grade 12 school of 450 students. Most of my classmates still live in Manitoba, except for me, one girl who’s in the Bahamas, and a guy in Alberta, that I know of.

The person who called me was actually one of my very good friends from high school. Except we haven’t spoken in at least five years. Five years! So we caught up on what we’ve been both up to since then, and since high school in general (she has married and now has three children), and she let me know what a lot of others whom we went to school with are up to.

We used to spend five days a week together for ten months of the year. Most I went to school with for the eight straight years I was at that school. Yet the large majority I haven’t seen since graduation day in June nine years ago. Some I thought I’d never loose touch with, yet in reality I haven’t seen any of them since 1999, and I haven’t been back to the town our school was in since 1998. A few classmates I talk to a couple of times a year, some every once in awhile find me on the internet.

These are people I shared a large chunk of my growing up years with, yet since then we’ve grown and changed and been educated and moved on.

This weekend I walked past the infants and children’s clothing section in a department store and I thought most of these people I went to school with and spent my childhood days with have now had children of their own. They’ve had the experience of love and marriage and pregnancy and birth and feeding and clothing and growing up little ones to take the places that we left vacant in the halls and classrooms of the school we shared together.

The reunion isn’t for almost 14 months, but I’m hoping to go. It’s weird to think it’s been almost 10 years… that’s a long time! It'll be neat to see everyone again, catch up on what we’ve all been up to, see how we’ve changed and how we’ve stayed the same. Can you do that all in one weekend?

I should probably start working out. I think there's some unspoken rule about how you should look better than you did when you were 18 when you go to these things.

:)