Small Town Class Reunion

I recently attended my 40^th class reunion. It was a wonderful time of reuniting, learning about our classmates' lives, and celebrating life as we've lived it together and apart.

The fact that people of exactly the same age seem to share nearly everything, whether they are next door or across the country is curious. Yet it gives a warm sense of belonging and for the philosophical types among us, many deep things to ponder.

My school is in a west central Illinois farm area. By and large, the students' families have lived in the area from the 1800's. In my class of 114, four of us are third cousins, sharing the same great grandparents. So the memories we share are not just our own, but those of our families. The values we share are mostly the same, since there's an unspoken standard that has to be met in a small town because no one ever forgets past actions.

When we graduated, the draft loomed large on the agenda for the men. They had a few choices. Going to college was one. In my freshman college year, the men outnumbered the women students 7 to 1. The choices made by my classmates at that time were life altering. None of them were killed in service (thanks be to God), yet all who served were changed.

A few of the women were married just before or right after high school graduation. They started their families soon after. Other women went off to college to see more of the world outside our town and most with goals of what sort of work they wanted to do that would require college. Some took the skills they'd learned in high school - typing, shorthand, and bookkeeping - and went to work, either in town or in neighboring towns. There were expectations for the women, again unspoken. But generally, those expectations were variations of this theme: work or school for two years, meet your husband-to-be, get married, work for two or so more years, have children, then be a stay-at-home mom. That agenda worked for some but for most, that lifestyle our mothers had enjoyed was about to be changed forever.

We jumped into our adult lives, head first, and began to go our separate ways. Some moved away from our hometown; others stayed. Even for those who stayed, it became a different world; a world inhabited by adults, not high school kids. People started calling us Mr. or Mrs., Mom or Dad. We became wage earners, soldiers, teachers, nurses, insurance agents, store clerks, secretaries, bank tellers, forklift drivers, auto mechanics, truck drivers, farmers, and one professional football player. We went places we wanted to go and places we didn't want to go. We did things we wanted to do and a lot of things we didn't want to do. It was heady - making our own decisions, earning our own money, making our own way. It was shocking to discover that kind of power had a down side called Responsibility!

Where would all these different paths take us in our lives? See Part II!