Class Reunion

In August 2010, the Belgrade High School (Minnesota) Class of 1960 will celebrate its 50th anniversary. I suppose that is an achievement of some sort. We started with 50 classmates, and very few of them have gone on to their alternative or heavenly reward. I wonder, though, how many have obtained their earthly reward.

Back in earlier days, class reunions were more about who made it and became "somebody" after high school graduation. These get-togethers had the distinct flavor of "my car is bigger than your car" (house, number of children, academic degrees, money in the bank, notoriety, etc.) and less about shared (common) experience in this chaotic world of wildly competing interests, psychic comfort, or spiritual awareness. Classmates who felt inferior to the faux-gold standard of achievement and didn't possess sufficient bragging rights often stayed away from these reunions.

Now that we're all nearly 70 years of age, I wonder how the "group ethic" will have changed (if it has changed). Instead of going on and on about children, grandchildren, careers, and illnesses, I wonder if we will instead converse about whether what we've done in our individual lives has given us meaning, fulfillment, comfort, or wisdom and, if not, how we could find those things in the years we have left in this plane of existence. That would be a conversation worth having. If it's just another iteration of who's who and who looks "good," I think I'll skip this reunion too.