Touching Home Base, or What I Learned at My High School Reunion

Some say that life happens in passages, and each passage – like chapters in a book of short stories – have their own unique plot lines. My life has certainly had distinct segments, each one occurring with its own unique cast of characters, locations, even careers.
So when I went back for my 30th high school reunion this past summer, I was truly walking back into another time and another place, and one that was many, many segments detached from the current chapter of my life. Nothing in my current life is the same as it was in 1978 except for the existence of my sisters, and even their involvement is limited – neither went to high school at the time that I did.

High school was a great segment of my life, and I threw myself into many activities – band, choir, theatre, the school newspaper – I even wrote for and edited the literary journal. But life didn’t end at high school graduation; it just changed. College was an entirely different set of experiences, and from there, each decade brought with it several major changes along with the new mailing addresses.

The reunion was actually for the entire decade of the seventies (making it my 32nd reunion, for those who are counting) and the committee had asked all of us who had performed in musicals throughout the decade to perform individually and as a choir. Not only was I walking into a room full of people I hadn’t seen in thirty-two years, but I had to sing “If I Were a Rich Man” from when I played Tevye in 1977. Would I be as good as I was then? Was I good then? I can’t remember. I mean, they clapped then for that 17 year-old pretending to be a Jewish man. But that could have been some anti-drug “support our youth” kind of thing.

I arrived back at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois – a northwest suburb of Chicago – an entirely different person. I was significantly older, greyer, heavier (unfortunately) -- I even had a new last name, which is another story for another time (though it was great fun telling people that I had a run in with the law in Reno). I had nothing to hang my head over in this homecoming – I had amassed a Ph.D., a great family, an amazing career, and plenty to prove that I had made the most of my life. If this was a test of how well we'd done since 1978, I was ready to pass with flying colors.

Lincolnshire had changed as well since 1978, as the city of Chicago had invaded the miles of our cornfields and quaint towns and had turned them into crowded subdivisions, corporate campuses, and endless strip malls. Even the school was different, having been renovated to four times its size -- a single hallway was the only flash from the past. Even the front doors had been moved. So neither of us were reuniting with the assumption that time had stopped.

Perhaps, I conjectured, this weekend would be some kind of time-travel experience, similar to what I had witnessed when alumni return to college homecoming games and act like 19-year-old idiots again (with 50-year-old livers). We'd all be transformed back to seventeen and have three magical days without debt, screaming bosses, or retirement funds to fret over. Sounded good -- a break from reality without psychosis is always nice.

Walking into the theatre for rehearsal (not the original theatre, as I had hoped, but a nice one nonetheless), I didn’t experience that magic transportation back in time, and (luckily) there was no one around taking score. Instead, I found something much better. I found a set of comrades who, like in the years of 1974 to 1978, were there to compare notes in solving the mystery of what it means to grow up. I found that all along this long road, I've had a home base.

We visited and sang and joked and hugged, and we spent most of our time catching up with each other on the many chapters of each other’s lives: marriages, children, divorces, degrees, careers, lost jobs, new cities, and second mortgages. High school was a distant memory, and no one was there to relive anything – we were here to check in with each other – to use our history as a way to touch home base before heading back out into the fray of our lives.

It didn’t matter what had happened thirty years ago. We who knew each other in the most fundamental ways were all together again. And this was different that any of the conversations I've had about life with many acquaintances over the years. These folks were with me from the beginning, as it were (and are there ever relationships that are closer than from this vantage point? Does anyone ever know us better than this?), and we were all experiencing the same unexpected view of our lives from our rear view mirrors, all looking to each other to hear, "I know -- me too."

Touching home base. It is, perhaps, one of the most profound experiences of life, the only way in which we are able to ground ourselves. How had I disregarded its power all these years, stuck in the hindered view of those around me now, at this moment, without context to guide them?

I also spent most of the time that weekend realizing that my seemingly diverse life passages weren’t so special after all – they were actually pretty typical. We had all struggled with our bodies getting old, our relationships having ups and downs, our finances ever changing, and our joys simple.

Most tender for us all at the moment was the shared loss of parents – some had gone, some were ill, others now lived miles away. And these stories bonded us most – they were a current connection that reminded us that we shared more than history. We each were walking a similar road. And it was important that we shared it with each other – that we checked in with one another to ensure that this, too, was a normal next step in the road.

The weekend ended with a memorial service for all those friends and teachers that had gone. Reading the list of names from my class to the group gathered in the commons, I realized that the power of “coming home” has little to do with proving myself or my choices over the decades. It was about confirming them; turning back to the same people who marvelled together about parents and pimples, sex and love, fears and futures – the only people who could truly understand the road travelled now to age and decline, victories and failures, life and death.

As I drove back to the airport, I realized that I had two profound blessings – an amazing privileged start to life with a dear set of friends, fellow travellers, and mentors, and now, a connection back to them that allowed us to walk through the rest of what life would bring. I had found home base. Perhaps I will never be able to g to it again, to touch it's familiar comfort. But I will never forget that it is there.