10 Years

This is a little late in coming and I intend on doing a more in-depth write up on this eventually, but for now this will have to do...

I went to my 10 year high school reunion last weekend. I was honestly pumped up about this event. Not because I'm some huge success and wanted to go rub it in people's faces... not because there was the prospect of hooking up with the ex prom queen... not because I wanted to see how miserable the lives of my enemies had turned out... None of those things were the reason. I was simply, purely and genuninely interested in what my old friends were up to.

My highschool, I have realized, was different from most. Although there were definite cliques and there were definitiely people who were more popular than others, by and large, we all kind of hung out together. I wrote a whole essay about this about six years ago. Basically, it wasn't just that the jocks hung out with the nerds and the kids in the band... the jocks WERE the nerds and the kids in the band, as well as the arty granola hippies and the vocational school rednecks. Pretty much, we were all friends. At the very least we all knew each other's names, which doesn't happen in a lot of schools.

So I really and truly was just excited to see people again and find out what they were up to. The thought of being nervous never crossed my mind... Right up until the point, and I mean the INSTANT, we pulled into the banquet hall's parking lot. Just as we turned in off the road, I saw somebody getting out of their car. It was a guy I graduated with whose name was Glen, but who everybody called G.W. I hadn't seen G.W. since the summer after graduation but I recognized him instantly. He looked exactly the same... yet remarkably different. I mean, it was just G.W.... only ten years later. He'd grown about 4 inches and put on about fifty pounds of solid muscle. That's when the wave hit me. Suddenly I felt dizzy. For whatever reason, at that moment the realization hit me that I was going to be seeing all these people I once knew... only ten years later. In effect, all these people who I only remember as kids would now be grownups. I know this is an obvious observation, and I honestly didn't expect it to hit me as hard or as ludicrise-ly as it did. But suddenly I seriously felt as though I didn't know where I was.

We got out of the car and there was a bearded man standing next to his car dressed in ripped jeans and an old baseball hat. I didn't recognize him until my friend Jesse said his name, Colin. Oh my god, it WAS Colin. I remembered him as a young kid without a trace of facial hair and now he was a man. He spoke with a deep Maine drawl that I never remember him having and when he talked it was slow and quiet and deliberate. Sixty seconds into our conversation I had to sit down. Literally, i just sat right down in the dirt parking lot, knowing I was on the verge of passing out.

I'll hopefully get into the rest of this evening later on. But suffice it to say much of it felt a lot like these first two encounters. In fact I still feel like i'm tripping out right now. Dozens of faces of people I once knew. People I instantly recognized as the kids I'd hung out with, but who had, as far as my mind and memory were concerned, aged ten years in an instant.

There was no pretension shown by anybody there that night. Everybody greeted everyone else with genuine hugs, and for those first few minutes the conversations and tones of voice were those of the 17-year-olds we once were. And even as we discussed jobs, families, mortgages, land value and other typically grownup topics, these were still just my high school friends. I honestly can't figure out if it felt "weird" or "right."

All I know is that it was a truly awesome evening. When I left this place I always envisioned breezing back into town from L.A. speaking of whatever fabulous movie or TV show I was working on at the time and regaling everybody from this small hick county with stories from the big city, from show biz, from all the cool things I was doing and the people I was meeting. Instead, I came into town as just another Mt. View graduate, no better or worse than anybody else I knew. I actually found myself most amazed and intrigued by the stories of people who had stuck around the old homestead. Some actually were homesteading (one girl had built a house that had no electrcity or running water), other's were farmers, like real down home Maine farmers, and loving it. The aforementioned G.W. spent his days working his land up on Hogback Mountain (yes, it's actually called that) and putting out a local alternative newspaper. An independent movie crew just recently finished shooting a film up on his land and he helped them out with everything from cooking to standing in as an extra to all the miscellaneous tasks that go along with a film shoot.

What blows me away most is how much people still looked inherently the same. Nobody had gone bald. Nobody who was once skinny became fat. Nobody who was once plain became a super model. We're all doing so well, and what's even better is we're all doing well in our own unique ways. Hopefully as I spend more time thinking on it I'll be able to articulate all this better. Right now I still feel tripped right the hell out and my head is just buzzing with strong feelings that I can't even identify much less figure out why I'm having them.