La Porte High School Reunion

I was very nervous about going to my high school reunion Saturday night. I get that way when I'm dropped into a situation where I feel alone, and since I haven't kept up with more than a couple of people from high school, I felt alone. I didn't have a core group of friends back then. My friends were a diverse collection of individuals whose company and unique qualities I valued, and they were not always compatible with one another. Sadly, many of them were not able to attend.

Throughout the evening I spent most of my time with a mixture of friends and passing acquaintances at a typical convention-style dinner table, and much of the pointless rambling that follows was inspired by our conversations around that piece of furniture. These were all people I knew back then, but not completely, as you'll see.

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed talking and joking with the people at our table: Lisa, Sharla, Kelly, Thor, Jim, and Wendy, plus Margaret, Chris and a few others. I don't want to push this over the top, but spending time with these folks was actually one of the high points in my life. It made me feel really good and enabled me to connect with something in my history -- an area I generally avoid. Most importantly, for a little while I no longer felt alone. I am grateful for having had the opportunity, and going forward I hope I can build adult friendships with all of them. Each one of them is more interesting and attractive now than they ever were as high schoolers, and I hope they feel the same about me, even if they would never say so and would probably just spew a stream of vulgarities.

As adolescents, you could identify some of our basic personality traits, but we were so awkward and young and stupid and insecure that we couldn't have predicted then how our lives would be now. The people I was with yesterday, myself included, have experienced life -- love, loss, birth, death, tragedy, joy -- all of which fundamentally defined who each of us became. The raw materials that constituted us as children pointed us along the paths we were to follow and predicted our reactions to life's events, but the people present at that reunion were fundamentally different -- creations of the synthesis of nature and experience. I can hear it now: you're no doubt saying "Jeebus, Kevin, for God's sake stop the mental masturbation." That is certainly an accurate description (and excellent advice), but the climax of the process resulted in a phrase that summed it up for me nicely: A cathedral is much more beautiful than its constituent stones.

I don't want this post to sound like a lofty philosophical treatise retracing the very well-worn path of aging and maturity. It's been done far better than I ever could, every aspect of it is outside my field of expertise , and more importantly it is boring. The cold, hard fact is that most of the people I was with last night were vandals, trespassers, arsonists, and people of dubious moral character. If it wasn't for the statute of limitations, I could have made a bundle with a couple of calls to crime-stoppers, although I don't think they pay you for turning yourself in. Nor will they give you a group rate.

There are some truly amateurish photos that are being collected, and I will post links to the better ones (i.e., the ones with me in them) as I find them. If the mood strikes me, I might even take liberties with Photoshop in order to sully the reputation of a few of the fine, upstanding graduates of the fine institution that was La Porte High School.

Please leave comments to this one -- I feel like a verbal brawl would top this topic off nicely, especially if I can work the word douchebag into the comments.