Next weekend I am going to attend my 40th Highschool Reunion in El Reno, Oklahoma. I am going to spend a week with my mother and I decided it seemed like a good idea not to go to Oklahoma and miss my reunion by a week. I don't remember a lot of people who I went to highschool with, but seeing their faces and hearing their stories will probably help bring some memories back.
I don't think I had a very good time in highschool, and I was eager to leave Oklahoma and get out into the big world. I wish I had been more outside of myself in highschool I would have liked to get to know more people, make more friends, have more fun times to talk about. In highschool, we are so young, that we aren't "formed" yet into the people we are meant to be. I was judging myself by a faulty yardstick back then. My ruler for success had something to do with the person next to me, and my efforts went into measuring up to others standards--not my own. Now I know that is it not how we look that is important, but how we feel. I feel great.
Looking back, I have a lot of fun memories and I guess I had fun. It is just that I have so much more fun now. It was exciting to be a girl then, and have dates with boys, and go to football games and sing in the school choir and have a crush on a young teacher. It was fun to do well at the courses that I liked, and it was awful to try to get a passing grade in Chemistry or Algebra, which I hated.
I never think of those years in the mid-sixties without thinking about my dear sweet quiet father, who waited on the porch in his lawnchair for the "boy" to come and pick me up for a date. He must have scared the wits out of them...just sitting there, not saying much. He wasn't trying to. He was just sitting in the chair where he liked to spend the evenings after supper. But, running that gamut to get to me, and then meeting my mother, who is very outgoing, must have been a bit daunting. I never dated a boy who couldn't take that heat, and more, and stand up to it. I am still friends with one of them, and that is a great thing to be able to say after 40 years!
I have a new dress to wear to the reunion, and I am going to make myself a couple of "knock your socks off" necklaces. I bought a CD of Sam Cooke, to remind me of those good ol' days, and I'm ready to dance if someone asks me. It will be fun to meet those nice folks again, and if I don't remember them from the first time around, who really cares?
See you tomorrow
