I have been talking to friends and classmates about this reunion, doing various tasks and trying to drum up enthusiasm for this silver celebration since October of 2009.  I have said "25th reunion" more times in the last 8 months than I think I have said hello to my husband!  It just never hit me.  Never really clicked.  Until this one afternoon in July.  I was with Heidi at a meeting checking out a prospective venue, and while doing the walk through, it just came up and SLAPPED me upside the head!

It was absolutely unbelievable.  I was floored by the brazenness of the whole idea of it!  We have been out of school for twenty-five years.  TWENTY-FIVE YEARS, people!  Oh my god!  How did this happen?  I mean, yesterday I was moving away from my parents' home, getting married, raising my family, going to school, changing careers or making family choices, and NOW....now I have been out of school for 25 years.  That is an entire adult's life on top of the 18 years that we put into school! 

A few pounds more, a few gray hairs more (OK,  A LOT more for me, and less for some, hair that is ;-) ) 12 different moves and, now, I am a grandmother to boot.  How did life fly by so quickly?

So I ask myself, "Why is this reunion so important to me, to all of us?". 

Reconnecting with people of our past for most of us, is a reconnection to our youth.  But even more, I feel that it is a reconnection to all that we have accomplished and to all those that we have touched in the last 25 years.  When in high school, we are being molded, shaped and prepared for what lay ahead.  Having no idea who we were to become, we based our opinions of each other on who we were and what little we knew then, and rightly so as we had no other frame of reference.  Now, though some might say we don't really change who we are at our core, we are someone else.  At the very least, we have more experience, more wisdom, more education, both formal and street smarts, and hopefully we are better than we were 25 years ago, and we need the opportunity to express our new selves to our past perceptions. 

When people go to reunions, they don't normally walk in to show off what a schmuck they are; they carefully craft who they are by looking inward and pulling out all that they are proud of, polishing off all the ways they have done good in the world.  In this sense, we reconnect to some very positive moments in our lives, we find that we really are more than what we were.

I have heard some say that they don't go to reunions because they kept in touch with those that they wanted to keep in touch with, and if they didn't keep in touch with someone, it was because they didn't really have a desire to in the first place.  That may have been true in the first few years, but after 25 years, can we truly say that we have no desire to connect with so-and-so, or what's-her-name?  How can we, we don't even know who this person is anymore.  Do people even know who you are anymore?  It is an interesting and exciting notion to realize that we can get to know each other on a completely different level, as long as we can put aside our preconceived stereotypes of who we used to be. 

What reasons might you have for celebrating 25 years after high school graduation?  I want to hear from you, they don't have to be as philosophical as I have presented here.  Simple is great!  Email me at enricofermiclassof1985reunion@yahoo.com and let me know.  I will post them here and on Facebook anonymously.  I love a good survey!

See you at the reunion!!