|
|
|
Jewish World Review Augus 2, 2005 / 26 Tammuz, 5765 Getting reacquainted with ourselves By Ruben Navarrette Jr.
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Among the defining moments in one's life, I'd include attending your 20th high school reunion.
I had that experience recently. Once I got the invitation to join my classmates from Sanger High School's class of 1985, I knew I had to go. I was much too curious. I don't mean that in the traditional sense. It wasn't that I wanted to know how my classmates turned out — who was successful, who married whom, who lived where.
That's what the 10-year reunion was all about. My friends and I spent the whole evening back then talking about our careers, our dreams, and our plans for the future. What I remember about the gathering was a lot of people trying really hard to impress other people. Chalk it up to immaturity. Most of us were 28, and we were works in progress. A lot of us were stumbling around and finding our way.
I myself was trying to get my writing career off the ground and struggling with whether that necessarily meant leaving my beloved San Joaquin Valley in Central California.
Now, another decade had gone by. And I was being called back. What I was curious about was the whole premise. After all, a high school reunion is a totally unnatural experience. Think about it. You graduate from high school, and you and your friends go your separate ways. Years breeze by. People get married — and divorced.
They find their passion — and maybe, sadly, lose a parent. If they're lucky, they discover their "sense of place" in the one city or town in which they feel comfortable. And then, one night, they drive down the highway or board a plane to attend a gathering where they hug and laugh and introduce spouses to old flames.
Here you are slipping — if only for a few hours — back into the lives of people who, once upon a time, you saw every day in an all-too-familiar place that once represented your whole world.
In many respects, these people are now perfect strangers. But then again, there's so much you know and remember about them. How can you even hope to catch up? What do you say first?
There were those who never left our hometown, and those who did and had now traveled thousands of miles to get back. More than anything, that seemed to have the greatest impact on how my old friends saw the world and what they wanted from life.
Like a lot of Americans, I attended a "segregated" high school where the social scene was carved up into cliques — jocks, cheerleaders, brains, etc. Well, the reunion was segregated too, but in a different way. People congregated with like spirits, and, from the looks of it, one of the dividing lines had to do with whether you'd left home or decided to stay close to your roots.
I don't remember anyone talking about careers. For many of my classmates, it seemed that part of pushing 40 was being settled and resigned to the fact that if you haven't gotten your career off the ground by now, you might want to think about scrubbing the mission.
There's a lesson for the high school graduates of today. When all is said and done, the most important part of your legacy will be the kind of kids you raised. It's the only thing that will matter to you — or to anyone else.
In September, Fox will launch a new television series titled "Reunion," which traces the lives of six high school friends as they unfold over the following 20 years, presumably leading up to their own reunion. Each episode represents one year in the friendship. And in the first episode there's already a reference to the fact that one of the six will be murdered before the season is over.
Real life isn't so dramatic as what comes out of Hollywood. But if you make the effort to reacquaint yourself with old friends, and pay close attention when you do, it can be every bit as interesting.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
To comment, please click here.
|
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
