One Decade Down

This coming weekend marks my 10 year Hickman High School reunion – The Class of 2000.  It took me awhile to find the Columbia Daily Tribune’s article about it (way back in their “archives”…that aren’t what I’d call “searchable”), mostly so I could remind myself of the statistics these kinds of things tend to include: 619 graduates, 73% of which were going on to four-year colleges, 13% to jobs, and the remainder to two-year schools or the military.

We’ll be heading down to Columbia this Friday to attend this year’s Hickman Homecoming Game, and hopefully we’ll get to see my old marching band play some of this year’s show while we’re at it.  Otherwise, the general “plan” is for people to get together for some Mizzou tailgating (which I won’t do, in favor of frolfing with Stu…) followed by a group dinner at Boone Tavern on Saturday night.  RSVPs for all of this were done over Facebook, so while I have some idea who is attending, I don’t know exactly because the invites were only sent to “fans” of “Hickman High School Class of 2000.”  If you weren’t a “fan” of that particular Facebook Group, you probably didn’t get the invite.  So yeah, to an extent, I have no idea who’s going to even be at this event, besides a few specific people I’ve chit-chatted with in the past few months.

That all aside, we’re due for a visit to Columbia.  We haven’t been down there for a few months now and Mom is itching to take Meg shopping for some winter clothes (which is good, ’cause Iowa is COLD).

But back to the Reunion.  This will be the first time most of my “Group of Friends” from high school meet Meg.  In a few cases, this will be the first time they meet Brooke!  I guess part of the fun of going to a 10 year High School Reunion is “reconnecting” with friends you haven’t seen in years (or a decade), but it’s going to be fascinating to see what trajectories we all ended up on.  I was friends with a wide variety of folks in high school, ranging from valedictorians to band geeks to space station simulators.  To date, I’m the only one I can think of from high school that was part of that group and also has a child.  I’m also one of the few that is married (although most have “significant others,” to some degree).  Considering 10 years has passed, I find those particular milestones to be rather interesting, as I’d argue that the preceding generations had a higher percentage of individuals that were married and had at least one kid 10 years after graduating high school (my Mom had 2 kids within 10 years of graduation).

I guess  I’m just reflecting on how I ended up here, as compared with others from my graduating class.  Whether it was always subconsciously in the plan to be married, have kids, and have a Ph.D. in time for my 10 year reunion.  Whether that notion was part of other people’s plans, or whether their lives took them in completely different directions than they’d otherwise intended.  Whether I will be considered the odd-man-out, or whether someone else’s shocking revelation will trounce anything I could come up with in this post.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not worried about going to the reunion.  On TV, you see people fretting about going back to their high school reunions, usually that they’ll seem somehow “less successful” than their brethren, or that they have memories of the “high school experience” that no one else remembers like you do (think of the season three 30 Rock episode, “Reunion“).  Despite my questions above, I’m just genuinely intrigued by the idea of how my experience differs from the experiences of the other people I hung out with in high school.  Personally, I think if we were to rate attendees based on their “successes” post-graduation, I’d rate fairly highly.  I guess I’m just wondering if I meet the expectations that my friends had 10 years ago, and if they will all meet mine.

I guess I just find it all to be “curious.”