The other day a group of high school friends and I face-timed.
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| Warren Beatty |
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| Sandra Bullock |
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| Shirley Maclaine |
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| Forrest Tucker |
No, not them – although they did all attend Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, VA at one time or another. (Now it’s called Washington-Liberty, but that’s another story.)
To those of you living within range of where your formative years happened, seeing high school friends may seem like no big deal, but many of us scattered to the winds. And we’re in different places in more than one sense.
I’m a retired English teacher who’s lived in Massachusetts for the past 49 years.
Chris has just retired last year from her position as head of history at a community college in Maryland. Once one of five kids from a standard Irish-Catholic family, she now has two sons, a flock of grandchildren, a doctorate, and celebrated her Bat Mitzvah at age 70.
Sheila lived in Rockport, MA for twenty years, where a wall of her stained glass still graces the town’s public library. She’s been in the artist colony of Shepherdstown, West VA for the past 25+ years, now living alone after three husbands, and struggling to make ends meet.
Andrea has been in Hawaii for the past umpteen years, was once a TV producer in the Midwest, and is coping with a 99-year-old husband who’d been a Navy fighter pilot in WWII and who’s convinced he can still drive.
And yet we still connect. It’s priceless when your family is disappearing in droves to still have people who remember you as a teenager. I sometimes think in some ways that was the real us.
I wouldn't be a teenager again for anything (or anyone). It was a foretaste of hell for me.
ReplyDeletePretty deep when you suggest "that was the real us." I like this idea!
ReplyDeleteMy teen age friends from high school are no longer with us. Many of my friends from later in life are gone, too. I blame the war in Vietnam for taking so many high school friends! I wish I had old friends to fall back on.
ReplyDeleteThat's hard, Joanne.
DeleteI wasn't close enough with any of them to be keeping in touch and I barely remember even a handful of names.
ReplyDeleteIt's great that you're still in touch with all those folks. I don't think I was the real me as a teenager. Maybe by my 20s.
ReplyDeleteI hope that wasn't the real me. I like the old lady version better, even if I was prettier then.
ReplyDeleteI'm still maintain long-distance friendships with 4 of my high school friends. They are all so special to me. The ties are soul deep.
ReplyDeleteHow nice to still be in touch with friends from the teen years - and a nice accomplished bunch. Much of my teenaged self was the real me, buried under a bunch of raging hormones.
ReplyDeleteI did attend a small class reunion a few years ago. We were a small graduating class to begin with and now even smaller.
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