High School Reunions



I have been very good about avoiding my high school and college reunions up to now. It has been largely easy as for most of them I lived outside the state and nobody after the 10th high school one was able to locate me. And I graduated out of my class in college as I had quit for a year or so to get more money to attend. Then graduated out of summer school. Nine months later I could have taken a trip back from the east coast to New Mexico to go through the ceremony but I was into fighting for an end to the war in Viet Nam.

That I am going to my high school class reunion this year I blame on Facebook. Took everyone a while but I was found out mostly by the ladies of Mu Heta Sigma (the misspelling of Eta is so it is MHS as in Manzano High School). We were a service organization and a few of them decided to throw together a '62, '63 and '64 joint reunion.

Me in third row and Leslie in front

Leslie McHugh set up a FaceBook group for the reunion and asked me to join. I would sneak back now and then to see if any of my old classmates were admitting to being graduates. I admit to doing my absolute best at forgetting high school. I tried to be invisible during high school and denied attending once I got to the University of New Mexico. High school was not a happy time for me to put it mildly. I frankly hoped the reunion group would ignore me.

But this week I dug out the old annuals. This required a trip to the storage shed, moving everything off the mostly empty steamer trunk and digging them out from under old stuff I wondered why I had not tossed. I wondered briefly why I had not long ago tossed them but evidently their internment in the steamer trunk with the university annuals and scrap books was penance enough.



My graduating class was 345 and I always joked that anyone that went to a reunion I would not want to see. And anyone I really wanted to see wouldn't be caught dead at one. That makes me sound like a bad girl but everyone seems to have called me sweet and cute. I didn't get wild and crazy till college.

Out of the three classes in this reunion only 176 have committed to attend. A couple I would have really liked to see like my first ever boyfriend will not be there. A couple I thought I wanted to see again I now know I will be spending the evening avoiding. And three of those I shared that annual page with, who I would really liked to have seen, have not connected up on FaceBook. My prom date is one of the missing in action and maybe that is good.

I am still at a complete loss as to why anyone wants to relive their high school years but I am going through the year books and trying to get to know the person I tried so hard to forget existed - Me as a teenager.

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