I'm going to begin with an apology. I mean no disrespect or intent to ruin the fun that will be had this weekend at my high school graduating class fifty year reunion. I truly hope everyone attending has a great time.
I have never been a person that looks back and says, shoulda, woulda, coulda. In fact I rarely look back at all. To paraphrase the great Satchel Paige, if you look back you might see what you're looking at, gaining on you.
I am more of a looking forward kind of person. I have a gigantic interest for what is coming down the road. I wish that I had a super power that would let me see into the future. In fact, in some ways I do. In business I was always able to take the view from forty thousand feet on situations and make decisions based on seeing the whole field, and what was ahead.
Many people are comfortable at ground level and grinding it out each day. I wish I was like them many days. Others are able to see the forest from the trees and that helps them in life traverse its winding path. We each have different needs and wants in life and our ability to navigate is based on how we look at things.
So what the hell does any of this have to do with a high school reunion?
Well, for me, I have never had any interest in my various high school reunions. I didn't particularly have fond, or negative, memories of those four years. They were just four years in my life and then I moved on. Frankly, I have never been able to understand why people feel the need to rehash their high school years.
I lost my yearbooks about forty five years ago in a flood in the basement of one of the apartments I lived in back in the day and frankly I never cared that much. The Talon pictured above is, I believe, my senior year cover. How 70's it looks.
The wonderful people that have been organizing the reunions over the years have set up a Facebook page where you can go for information and registration. Many people have posted pictures, both current and past, of themselves and others from school. I do not recognize any faces or names other than the few people I still am in contact with from those days.
I am not sure what I was doing for four years but apparently meeting people was not one of them. Its not like I wasn't involved in things. I wrote and was sports editor for the school newspaper. I read the morning announcements each day over the PA. I was the courtside announcer for basketball games my senior year. And I was asked to be the host emcee for the National Student Council Convention held at the school right after graduation.
As I looked at the list of attendees for this years reunion I wasn't surprised to see that I only knew about six names. For a moment I found it sad and then I moved on. I know that I talked to many really nice people in my four years there but I have no memory of their names or faces.
My friends, The Hammas, whom you might remember from my book, would mention different people and tell me a story about them and I had no clue who they were talking about. This would frustrate them and they would show me a picture in the yearbook and I still had no idea who they were.
Honestly, for four years I must have just kept my head down and plodded through each day. Equally as bad is my lack of memory of one single teacher. If you held a gun to my head and told me to give you one name of one teacher I would be dead. I can barely remember how the school was laid out.
This is not a recent evolution, I had no memory of names or faces ten years after graduation. I have always erased names and faces from my mind once my time with them was done. This holds true for my business career too. I am not one to keep things in my memory bank because there are too many things I have to remember at any given time and storage is an issue.
Some will read this and think I am a cold hearted son of a gun, and I can be, but not because of this. I suppose if I cared enough I would go get help and find out why I am like I am, but frankly, I don't really care.
I really do hope that everyone who is going to the reunion has a wonderful time and renews old acquaintances. Because of personal commitments that I have here I am not going to go, and if I'm being honest, even without those commitments I would not be attending. It just holds no interest for me.
I am sorry if that bothers some, but it is the way I have always felt and I can't change the way I am. I will surely get some blow back on social media on this and I'm prepared to face the music. It won't change the way I feel.
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