Reunion

One of the main reasons for setting out on my adventure this year was connected to my 35th high school reunion. Now that reunion is past and I find myself still sorting through it. Why was it so important to go? What did I expect and what did I receive?

I went to a small all girls’ prep school in New Jersey. I entered in the fall of 1968 – a year after the summer of love in San Francisco. Yet in New Jersey, at my school, we were required to wear uniforms and the head of the school would make you knee in front of her to show that your skirt was not above your knees!

Huge changes were rumbling around the world. John Kennedy was gone, so too Martin Luther King and Bobbie Kennedy and yet in the bubble of the school that first year of high school it might have been the fifties for the way we thought of ourselves and the world. We were privileged white girls (we did have the first black student in our class). We expected we would always want to wear penny loafers and Peter Pan collar dresses and go on to college for our Mrs. Degree.

In the four years of high school everything changed for us and for the world. The shootings at Kent State happened, Woodstock happened, and we began to find our voices with the first Earth Day, protesting the Vietnam War, arguing about uniforms, and experimenting with drugs at school. I have some sympathy for the administration that I don’t think ever saw what was coming.


Thirty-five years later, the women who came to the reunion were a fabulous gathering of accomplished women – not all in usual ways. In our class there are doctors and businesswomen,professors annd educators of colleges ad universities, artists, whale researchers and mothers, financial wizards and explorers. Somehow in the turbulent growing up time we managed to expand and develop unique lives. We were still breaking the rules as we had done in high school.

Our class had been known to do that – break rules and so even at the reunion when we were all being ‘too loud’ while speeches were going on, we found ourselves being told to be quiet by older class groups. We chose instead to move to another part of the campus and keep talking. We shared stories how what an amazing time in history that we had been in school and how it had affected us. We had such a wide range of experiences; the pretenses of impressing each other were past.

Why was it important to go? I think I needed to know that I wasn’t crazy – that the time of being in high school had been important. I needed to see others having had made unique choices that didn’t fit the norm – it seemed like we had never fit the norm then and still didn’t now. I got to talk with kind and concerned women – to see us alive and kicking – still very much on a path of growth and change – there was no slinking off into old age for us. We got to celebrate our roots and be thrilled to see the changes at the school. No longer was there just one student of color – now there were faces of many different hues. One of our classmate’s daughters goes to the school now – the only legacy from our class. She is a bright, thoughtful girl who was so glad to meet her Mom’s friends and hear about the ‘old’ days. I left with hope that another generation of women could learn to make their way on their own terms- whatever they wanted them to be. I also felt inspired to keep breaking the rules and finding my own true way and being thankful for a place that I didn’t think set out to teach me that but in fact had.