I spent the plane ride back to LA on Monday scribbling down thoughts about the reunion.  And they morphed into a three-part blog post.  The first part was put up yesterday at:

chloedevlin.blogspot.com/2009/10/has-it-really-been-30-years-or-you-look.html

Per Kevin and Linda's request, here's a copy of that blog post.  But come visit my blog and comment.

           “Has It Really Been 30 Years”… or “You look great!”

My first blog post in over a year and all it took was my 30^th 9^th Grade Reunion.

           “Make new friends, but keep the old.

           One is silver, and the other gold.”

A snippet of a song (I’m not sure if it’s from Girl Scouts or summer camp) keeps running through my head.  Yet I feel like I made and remade new and old friends this weekend.

It’s been 30 years since the 9^th graders of 1979 from Parkway East Junior High said a sad goodbye – to the school, to our friends, even to classmates we didn’t really know.  Because Parkway East Junior High was special, different, unique.

Parkway East Junior High and its graduates (especially from 1979) were an anomaly – different from any other Parkway junior high school.  See, we didn’t have a corresponding high school.  There was never a Parkway East Senior High.  So our class of ____ students split up, some went to Parkway North, others to Parkway Central.  Still more to Parkway West and Parkway South.

So instead of seeing people who you went to junior high and high school with at your high school reunion at the 10, 15 and 20^th reunions, there always felt like something was missing.  Classmates who you shared experiences with weren’t there to reminisce.

I know that the older I get, the more I reminisce.  So at my 20^th high school reunion for Parkway Central Senior High, I spent lots of time talking about things that happened.  But mostly what happened in high school – yet I have certain memories of people, places, classes and experiences that didn’t mean anything to my high school friends who went to Parkway Central Junior High.

I missed my 25^th high school reunion because I was at a writers’ conference.  However, because of Facebook, I’ve begun reconnecting with old friends.  But not just high school friends.  I’ve reconnected with old college buddies, youth group friends, elementary school people… and friends and acquaintances from my wonderfully unique junior high.

Not long after the Parkway East Junior High class of 1979 graduated, the district made changes to some of the schools.  A name change here, a redistricting there and pretty soon Parkway East Junior High became Parkway Northeast Middle School.  And no longer did the students split up and go to different high schools.  And no longer were they the Parkway East Golden Eagles with school colors of red and gold.  They became the Parkway Northeast Vikings, now linked to Parkway North High School, who wore purple and white and were also the Vikings.

Little by little, every vestige of our past is being erased.  As if it never existed.

But we did.  We were the Eagles.  We wore red and gold proudly.  We cheered for our teams, hoping to beat the other junior high teams in sports.  We trash-talked against the Colts (Central), the Vikings (North), the Longhorns (West) and the Patriots (South) – yet we knew that the next year, we would become Colts and Vikings and Longhorns and Patriots.

Some months ago, a couple of classmates were sitting around talking and came up with the brilliant idea to have a reunion for our 9^th grade class.  Between them and the rest of the reunion committee, they planned an unbelievable event.

And this past weekend, we gathered in St. Louis to celebrate a special time in our lives – one that is a unique experience that few have ever (and now will never) experience.  Not only did we go back to school – we bypassed high school and went all the way back to junior high – literally and figuratively.

The weekend started out with a tour of the school on Friday morning.  Find out how that went in the next post.

The second part of my blog post about the reunion is up.  Come visit and comment.

chloedevlin.blogspot.com/2009/10/has-it-really-been-30-years-or-you-look_08.html

BTW, yes, this is me -- or actually it's my alter ego, Chloe Devlin.  That's the pen name that I've written my short stories under.

Julie

Here's the second part of my reunion recap.  It's posted at my blog -- www.chloedevlin.com.

Continued from yesterday – this is all about the Parkway East 9^th Grade 30^th Reunion.

Friday morning, about 10 of us gathered in the front office of Parkway Northeast Middle School to tour/explore the school.  To see if our memories of where things were located were accurate, to see if it was as big as we remember. 

It was… and it wasn’t.

Just to walk into the Great Hall where we ate lunch, or the Home Ec room (do schools really still teach Home Ec), or the band room, or the drama room, or the gym… brought back different memories for each of us.  Some shared, some individual.

But how poignant it was to walk into the gym and see a Viking painted on the wall instead of an Eagle.  Yet a few small traces of the past still remain.  Some old red and gold flag football flags and some old sports letters for Parkway East Junior High were found in the gym lockup.  Sandwiched between the purple and white wrestling mats in the relatively new small gym were some faded, cracked red and gold mats.  And we all oohed and aahed… and wondered if we had flopped on that particular mat.

The building itself had a round circular section with classrooms on the outer edge.  In the middle, the library was upstairs and the science department was downstairs. 

When we went to school, the downstairs science area as well as some of the classroom areas such as Unified Studies, were large open areas, split only by partitions.  Now, they are walled classrooms, most with no windows and only a door.  Yet every single one of us had memories of trudging downstairs to go to science class.

We wandered upstairs to the library where I had spent lots of time, looking for and checking out books to read.  The passing of time seems to have hit hard.  There were far fewer books on the shelves than I remember, yet progress showed with the many computer stations available.

As we continued traversing the circle, we all marveled that while the classrooms themselves seemed smaller, the circle seemed so much larger.

After signing out of the visitors log, our final act was to take a picture in front of the school sign.  Yet the sign wasn’t accurate – it didn’t reflect our reality, our memories.  So we stood up one of the red and gold mats we’d been given and draped a coat over part of the sign so that you couldn’t see the “North.”  It still said “Middle School” instead of “Junior High”, but at least it only said “Parkway East.”  We are the Parkway East Junior High Eagles.

While I didn’t go to lunch that day at Culpeppers, I made sure to stop by the informal gathering at the Brick Tavern and Tap that night.  I wasn’t sure how many classmates would be there.  As it turned out, there were 6 of us.  And I couldn’t have imagined a better group.  It gave us the opportunity to really talk, catch up, and get to know each other.  And I walked out of there, feeling as though I had just made 5 new/old friends.

The actual reunion event wasn’t until Saturday night.  I’ll talk about that night in the next post.

And if you can't wait to read about the actual reunion, Part III is already up at www.chloedevlin.com.  I'll try and post it here over the weekend.

Julie