Some thoughts on old friends, old fears, reading glasses, my fucking turkey neck, and discovering that growing older might be one of life’s greatest gifts.
My first thought the morning after my 40th high school reunion was, “Oh Lord, I survived AND I had a blast!”
Honestly, I felt better than I had any right to. Drinks were had. It had been a long night. I am now officially old enough to attend something with the words 40th class reunion attached to it, which seems like it should require either a medical waiver or an AARP representative stationed near the bar.
At first, the number 40 had shocked me. Forty years? Since high school? How in the hell did that happen?
But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. I have lived a lot of life since 1986. Enough life for at least three different iterations of Randy to work themselves out, screw things up, start over, learn a few things and eventually arrive at the person I am today.
And apparently, he can still stay out late and have a few drinks.
So there’s that.
Walking Back Into 1986—Sort Of
I was a little nervous walking into the reunion. The room was already jam-packed with people, which isn’t exactly the ideal environment for someone whose high school social strategy was largely be quiet and hope nobody notices anything unusual.
Then almost immediately I saw Holly and her gorgeous husband.
Is that too much to say right off the bat?
Good Lord.
The only man there who looked better was my husband. Obviously. I am married, not stupid.
What surprised me was that I wasn’t thinking about my age. I didn’t walk into the room feeling 58 or suddenly feel transported back to 18. The forty years between those two people were still very much there.
But after about half an hour, those years stopped feeling like some enormous mysterious gulf between us. They became almost like an old friend.
Throughout the night people would yell, “Randy!” across the room once they saw me for the first time that evening.
That felt really good.
I recognized almost everybody. There were maybe a handful of people I couldn’t place even while staring directly at their name tags, which seems unfair because the name tag is literally providing the answer. In my defense, all the BHS classes were invited, so I’m choosing to believe those people graduated in another year rather than admit that portions of my memory have apparently been deleted to make room for medication schedules and streaming-service passwords.
Apparently, We All Grew Up
The biggest surprise wasn’t how everyone looked.
Everybody looked great. We looked like older versions of ourselves, which is exactly what we’re supposed to look like. There was plenty of collective empathy about aching body parts and reading glasses. Aging jokes were flying around all night.
Personally, I have one complaint.
Fucking turkey neck.
There. I’ve said it.
But I don’t want to make jokes about anybody else’s aging because I have no desire to have fun at someone else’s expense. Besides, I’m too busy dealing with whatever the hell my own neck has decided to do.
What struck me much more than appearances was how kind everybody was.
The old Breakfast Club hierarchy seemed to be gone. Friend groups were still friend groups, of course, but they weren’t fortresses. People moved around. They talked. They laughed. They went out of their way to connect with one another.
I spent time talking with Leigh, whose laugh I loved in high school and discovered is every bit as contagious forty years later. I talked with people I barely knew back then and found myself thinking, Why didn’t I know you better?
In a few cases, we essentially got a fresh start.
Maybe that’s one of the unexpected gifts of getting older. Eventually, nobody has the energy—or the desire—to keep playing the superficial games that seemed so enormously important when we were teenagers.
We finally get to meet each other without all the high school bullshit in the way.
And Then There Was Missy
There was one person in particular who taught me something that night.
Missy and I were not mortal enemies in high school. Let’s not turn this into Dynasty: The Teen Years. But we didn’t get along.
And if I’m being fair, somewhere in the back of my mind I had probably kept a little scorecard about that relationship for forty years.
Then I met her again.
Her heart shines.
That’s the best way I know to say it.
She completely humbled me. The person standing in front of me wasn’t somebody from an old high school story. She was warm and kind and someone I realized I could become fast—and great—friends with today.
That might have been one of the most important lessons of the whole weekend.
Sometimes time doesn’t merely change other people.
It gives us enough distance to finally see them.
Everybody Has Been Through Some Shit
There were deeper conversations, too.
We talked about classmates who have died. We worried about a friend we all adore but couldn’t reach. I missed seeing Pat and Kelly, who couldn’t make it. The reunion was wonderful without them, but it would have been even better if they had been there.
I also heard stories about people’s lives that surprised me.
Those stories aren’t mine to tell.
But I can say this: forty years of adulthood has happened to every single one of us.
The circumstances have been vastly different, but the lessons are remarkably similar. Love. Loss. Success. Failure. Heartbreak. Illness. Reinvention. Starting over. Wondering what the hell we’re doing. Figuring it out. Discovering we hadn’t actually figured it out. Trying again.
At 18, our differences seemed enormous.
At 58, they don’t.
Life has a way of leveling the playing field.
And somewhere during all those conversations, I learned something else that surprised me.
People didn’t remember teenage Randy as the awful person teenage Randy apparently thought he was.
Mostly, they remembered me as quiet.
Well…
They also kinda knew I was gay.
Apparently, I wasn’t nearly as mysterious as I thought I was.
The Kid Who Was Terrified of Everything
That realization followed me home.
When I graduated from high school, I had absolutely no idea what my life was going to become.
I didn’t have some grand plan. I had fear. Lots and lots of fear.
If I could somehow grab that 18-year-old kid from my senior picture and show him the next forty years, he wouldn’t believe any of it.
He wouldn’t believe that someday he would be confident.
He wouldn’t believe he would be able to provide for a family.
He certainly wouldn’t believe the whole bizarre chapter where he would be abused by—and then eventually help lead—a religious organization that functioned like a cult.
And then survive it.
He wouldn’t believe how long it would take to understand who he really was.
And he absolutely wouldn’t believe that one day he’d walk into his 40th high school reunion, hear people happily yelling his name across the room, and feel completely accepted as a peer.
But there were pieces of the man I am now already living inside that frightened kid.
The empathy was there.
The ability to read a room and understand social dynamics was there.
He just didn’t know yet that those things were strengths.
Mostly, what teenage Randy got wrong was believing that everybody else was thinking about him nearly as much as he was thinking about himself.
Spoiler alert: they weren’t.
What I’d Tell Him Now
If I could sit down with that kid today, I think I’d tell him this:
Not everyone is an asshole.
Not everyone thinks you’re unworthy of love and friendship.
And you desperately need to stop condemning yourself and then blaming everybody else for a verdict you handed down against yourself.
You are already the treasure you need.
I’d probably give him one other piece of advice.
You can fall in love with Jesus.
But for the love of God, stay away from church culture and Christians who want to tell you who you’re supposed to become.
That little warning alone could have saved us both a tremendous amount of therapy.
Then again, changing any part of the road might change where I ended up.
And here’s the thing I realized after the reunion:
I like where I ended up. I have a good, rich life. I have nothing to apologize for.
I am alive. I know who I am. I have people I love and people who love me. The mystery of who I was supposed to become took decades to unravel, but I finally stopped trying to solve it.
And yeah, I think I’m pretty cool.
I also have good hair.
The neck may be staging a rebellion, but the hair is holding the line.
Forty Years Later
Maybe that’s what changes about reunions as we get older.
At the 10th anniversary of our graduation, we were probably still trying to prove who we’d become. Careers were getting started. Families were being built. Everybody was still assembling the adult version of themselves and hoping it looked convincing from across the room.
Forty years later, there seemed to be much less left to prove.
We’ve succeeded at things. We’ve screwed things up. We’ve loved people and lost people. We’ve changed our minds. We’ve changed our bodies. We’ve hurt people. We’ve forgiven people. We’ve needed forgiveness ourselves. We’ve started over more times than anybody imagined we would have to.
And somehow, after all of that living, we ended up back in a room together.
The thing that surprised me most was the feeling I had afterward.
Peace.
Not sadness about the years that had passed. Not some desperate wish to be young again.
Peace.
Forty years really have passed, and I’m glad they have.
Time gets blamed for taking things from us, and certainly it does. But time can also heal. It can soften the stories we’ve told ourselves about other people and about ourselves. It can turn old wounds into perspective, old enemies into potential friends and frightened teenagers into adults who finally understand that they were worthy all along.
Growing older isn’t the tragedy we sometimes make it out to be.
It’s a privilege.
And after forty years, maybe the best thing about seeing all those familiar faces wasn’t remembering who we used to be.
It was meeting who we all became.
No scorecards. No hierarchy. No need to prove a damn thing.
Just a bunch of people who have lived through some shit, wearing reading glasses, comparing aches, laughing like hell and still here to tell the stories.
And maybe that’s the best part.
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