“The real world isn’t like college.
It’s a lot more like high school.” ” Meryl Streep
It was a tough evening, the reunion of my high school graduating class from the ‘60’s at Sibley High School in West St. Paul, gathered last weekend at Mendakota Country Club in Mendota Heights. It truly was like being back in high school, which for me, wasn’t exactly a bed of roses.
The elite kids (we used to call them The Clique) were still seated at their own table, as we lesser types took turns paying court. The goofballs were more subdued but still hadn’t grown up. The drinkers hovered near the bar, and several of the Pretty People (including numerous beauty queens – our class had a lot of tiara power) were still pretty indeed. Where I fit in puzzled me as much as it ever did.
As I read through the booklet of “life events,” where each of us had been asked to write a few lines about what had happened to us “all these years,” I noted that the vast majority of them began “I have been married to xxxx for 40 years” or “My husband and I spend our time being grandparents and winter in Arizona” or “After two wonderful marriages, I am widowed and divide my time between Minnesota and our condo in Florida.” or “My wife and I spend six a months a year traveling in our RV.”
Hello? Really? Did all the divorced people stay home? What did you do between marriage and grandparenthood? Didn’t the Recession hit anyone but me? Granted only a third of my class of 300 was there, but my outcast buttons were pushed and blaring. I had come there with my best friend from high school, Pam, and her husband, and after three of four wonderful conversations with people I really wanted to see, and the dinner and “program” (which consisted reading aloud the names of the 10% of our class who had died), I left early.
I spent the next few days over-thinking the events, feeling sorry for myself because of my oddball status, and yet a little superior because I didn’t fit the molds. I searched a couple of my Major Insights books and found this statement from James Hollis: “In the end, having an interesting life, a life that disturbs complacency, a life that pulls us out of the comfortable and thereby demands a larger spiritual engagement than we planned or that feels comfortable is what matters most.”
I get an A on that one.
I went to a luncheon the next day with some of my old girlfriends that helped fill in the blanks: I learned that many in my class had struggled with or died of cancer; a beloved child had been killed in a car accident at age fifteen; mental illness was taking a toll; varieties of disappointments happened and dreams were deferred. Of course, no one would write about this in a booklet, for goodness sake.
I started to feel compassion for my classmates, and for myself, who had all, I am sure, struggled in some way or other. We are so quick to judge, to assume, to categorize. To compare how we’re “doing” to others (based on our surface observations). We can waste a lot of time making these assessments. My classmates and I, by God’s grace, are still married or not, working or not, grandparenting or not, traveling or not, financially secure or not, but we have survived and are present in the world in all of our diversity, obnoxiousness, and glory. Yay, us. Go,Warriors.
The wonderful Gloria Steinem wrote this: “We are so many selves. It’s not just the long-ago child within us who needs tenderness and inclusion but the person we were last year, wanted to be yesterday, tried to become in one job or in one winter, in one love affair or in one house where even now, we can close our eyes and smell the rooms.” See you in church. Barbara
