My 20th high school class reunion was really fun but, just like high school itself, a little competitive, too.
At Year 20, you’re still trying to impress each other.
You dole out nice pictures of your kids, or descriptions of your job, or accounts of how much more mature you are than when, as a sophomore, you kidnapped a goat.
The 30th was better, but everyone still seemed a little uncomfortable, if not a bit over-dressed.
And so came the other night.
It was the 40th class reunion of the Class of ’72 at ol' East Richland High School in Olney, the southeastern Illinois town known for its famed white squirrels that also has (or at least had) quite of few white squirrels who didn’t live in the trees (would I be referring to me and my pals ? … why, of course not!).
Don’t worry — I’m not going to wax nostalgic here.
This time, we all pretty much just wore jeans.
Closer to retirement than working toward promotions now, hardly anyone mentioned their jobs.
Unless prompted, few talked much about their kids because most now are out of the home and attending their own reunions.
With a nice showing (of a class of 240), this time we all just seemed to stand around or mill about, merrily trade remembrances and quit comparing kids and marriages and just started looking at each others’ wrinkles and how age has somehow set in.
Yup, No. 40 was a grand time.
As Lisa McWilliams Curry, these days of Lincoln but a former Olnean, aptly put it: “There were no airs. Everyone just went as themselves.”
High school reunions are, of course, always a little stressful, perhaps because high school was, too. There was lots of peer pressure, insecurities, constant competitiveness and young love experiments.
But at Reunion No. 40, with life having fully intervened, you tend to parlay it all into pleasant experiences and even joke about them.
“Remember,” asked Jan Keller, a free spirit who later became a guard at Pontiac Correctional Center, “the night I crawled out onto the roof of your mom’s car as you were driving it at 55 mph? Thank God you didn’t brake.”
“Remember,” asked Dan Cardinal, “the night Mike Nuding cold-cocked you after you hit your hand on the trunk of his car?”
“Remember,” asked yet another mate, “when Mr. Jenner sent you to the principal’s office in fourth grade because you wrote `FLICK’ above your math problem on the board and he thought you’d spelled something else?”
At Reunion No. 40, you also are especially thankful for two modern innovations:
• Reading glasses ... so you can actually read the literature; and
• Name tags.
Without them at a 40th reunion, in many cases you'd have no idea who you were talking to.
It's like a "Twilight Zone" episode where you all know each other, but only after you look down to realize you know them.
Sadly, time and gravity have not been kind.
We men have gained weight and lost hair.
Softened and rounded as well are the bodies of those same women who, 40 years prior, caused us guys to begin puberty right in the middle of Mrs. Henline’s stirring English class tribute to the sentence fragment.
The days of sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll are largely behind us, too.
The most daring thing most of us do now, drug-wise, is forget to take a Prilosec before a meal at El Rancherito.
As for “sex,” most of us now just check “male” on the forms.
And yet, we’re also finally all friends, inter-connected by our only commonalities now — our ex- high school … and life.
If it's true that only the successful, still svelte, nice-looking and courageous actually go back to their high school reunions, then we did something interesting last weekend.
We all went anyway.
What a great time it was.
Bill Flick is at flick@pantagraph.com
