This past weekend, we attended our 20-year high school reunion. The fact that it is already time for such an event is shocking. I still feel like (at least most of the time) that 18 year old kid who somehow managed to graduate from MSMS, despite coming into the experience with the absolute bare minimum academic requirements thanks to growing up in a tiny private school in truly rural southeast Mississippi. Even now, some part of my subconscious does not accept the fact that I managed to do it, as one of my recurring dreams is still one about missing a test, failing a class, or finding out that I was enrolled in a class that I never knew about, and the end result is me not graduating with the class. That scenario happened to a few folks, and I can only imagine how psychologically taxing it must have been to put so much effort into two years of intense study only to come up a bit short in the last week.
Our shared adventures-- being guinea pigs in an experiment, where none of the participants knew exactly what they were doing; the stress of knowing that our only option was collective success, because failure would not only be a personal defeat but would also torpedo the entire school experiment; and the whole process of being shoved into the fires of an academic oven during the day, then cooled in the social & residential experience at night-- forged us together into a group that still clings tightly together and is not broken away from without significant effort. Together with our beloved faculty, we were quickly formed into a family, one that is just as real as any biological one, and one that we long for when we are separated again.
I am a firm adherent to the philosophy that family is the people that we choose, not necessarily the ones that we are assigned by birth. The vast majority of those that are my family are my classmates from MSMS. So, it was no surprise that seeing them all together would be fantastic. What was shocking for me was the blinding flash of the obvious that even some of those folks who I haven't seen since the 10 year reunion would also make such a deep impact on my weekend. And that I would miss them so much when we all headed for home. And even though, just like regular families, there are some that are annoying, and some that we don't share a lot in common with, they all do add up to create the whole unit. They are all players in the stories that we still tell. I don't get all wrapped up with emotions, and rarely experience sentimentality, so I was surprised to find that I was terribly sad to leave on Sunday, and I don't know anyone who wasn't. Because while we thought that it was a high school reunion that we were attending, we were quickly reminded that it was actually something else. It was a family reunion.
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