Remembering

I’m 58 years old, so the 4 years of high school represent 7% of my life. While sometimes there seems to be an abundance of memories from those years, it is still just a small part of my memories. Some memories will stay with me forever, some things I will never recall again.

Certain people and events pop up in the first few seconds of scanning through my memories and seem to cover or obscure some of the others. It’s funny how some memories are there, ready to pop up with little or no encouragement, while you have to pound through the layer of years covering some of the others to even get a glimpse of them.

Then there are those memories somewhere in the middle. The ones you think you remember fairly well until you talk to someone who shares the memory with you and they recall it differently. At first you try to correct whoever it is and tell them that they have it twisted, but the more you talk with them, the more you realize you’re the one with the different take on it. You started out remembering bits and pieces and with each retelling or remembrance over the years, you add more and more to them until they had to be the way things went.

I remember all the people. That’s not hard to do with a class of just over 120, but there were 100 times that many memories, far too many to remember. That’s why I like reunions. It gives us a chance to realign those memories and if you change them enough, they become almost like new. A totally new set that you can carry with you.