Age is the Great Equalizer

Just about this time 40 years ago, we were starting senior year. Up until senior year, we all had our little groups – the jocks, the smokers, the brains, the band players, and the folks from Piney or from Steekee or from Philadelphia or wherever in the county they came from. Sometimes the groups intermingled and sometimes they didn’t, but as senior year progressed, it seemed like the little groups lost some of their pull and we slowly melded into one larger group --- a group that would end the year with what would be, up until that time, the biggest event of our lives.

On that first day of senior year, some of us already knew they would attend this or that college or take their place in the family business or the family farm. Others had big career dreams while others thought of nothing more that settling down right there in our hometown. Also, most of the guys had to deal with the draft in one way or another before they could set their sights on anything at all.

Finally, we were all converging on that one special event, and over the course of the year, it seemed to draw us closer together. We were beginning to realize that in a very few short months we would no longer be around some of the friends that, in some cases, we had seen every school day for 12 years.

Now, these many years later, we have reached a spot where we are beginning to have more in common than at no other time since that magical year. We each took a separate path to get to where we are; but the paths that split back then are, in some ways, starting to converge once again. We had our youth and freshness in common then and now it’s our maturity.

We used to tell each other our dreams and schemes and now we can share some of the many joys and a few of the scars from the lives we’ve lived. We all started out with high hopes and goals and with a bit of luck we accomplished most of them, and there are some we may still be working on, and others yet that we’ve had to bury. We’ve all had the joys and sorrows, the laughter and tears, and the achievements and the scars that come from living.

Sometimes however, I think our biggest fear is that as we look in the mirror at the grey hair and wrinkles – the face that looks more and more like our parents – in the back of our minds we somehow think that everyone else has escaped the process of time; that when we walk into that room at the reunion we will be looking at those same fresh faces we remember from so long ago. And honestly, I also think that as much as we are afraid we’ll see those faces, at the same time there‘s a part of us that is afraid we won’t.

After all, we are here, 40 years later, and and big part of us accepts that, but part of us never will.