Reunion Time

This past weekend was my five year high school reunion. I, along with about 1/3 of my class, gathered at Sacred Heart on Friday and then at Saint’s on Saturday to celebrate this occasion. As I wandered through the halls of SHA with the girls with whom I went to Panama City for Senior Spring Break (and with whom I haven’t really seen much of since), it seemed hard to believe that it had been five years. As we searched out our old classrooms and lockers, it felt like we could have still been students at Sacred Heart. But as I admired engagement rings, met husbands, and talked about careers, it seemed that high school was history long past. In some way, five years isn’t really a very long time at all. But in other ways, it’s quite a stretch of time. It is, after all, longer than the amount of time we actually spent in high school.

I had a good time hanging out with the groups of girls I had hung out with and floated between during high school. Of the girls who belonged to the groups I ran around with at SHA, there are some who I still keep in touch with on a regular basis, there are some I get sporadic emails from, there are some who I only run into on occasion, and there are some who I’ve never seen since the day we graduated. So the reunion was fun in that I got to see at least some girls from each of the groups I hung out with and got to catch up on what almost everyone I was interested in is up to these days. I liked my class when I was a student at SHA, and I still like it now, five years later. We have all types, but we’re a pretty good group that gets along despite differences.

One thing that it seemed many of the graduates of the class of ’99 had in common was that they had returned to Louisville for careers, law school, med school, marriages, and life in general. The majority of my friends are settled here, and of those who aren’t, it seems that many plan to return soon. And while they all told me how jealous they were of my adventures, I found myself a bit jealous of their lives. Those who have stayed close to Louisville or who have returned often have been able to take the bonds that were built at Sacred Heart and develop them much more than I have been able to. They meet for weekly dinners and after-work drinks. They always have someone nearby who they can reminisce with; someone who knows their history almost as well as they do. Like my parents, they will have lifelong friends. The people they will hang out with when they are fifty are people who will be able to recall what they were like when they were fifteen.

While some may think, "Oh God, who would want anyone to be able to remember that?" I think there’s something special about it. I’ve thought about this a lot, probably because I always seem to be running off somewhere, making friends who are scattered throughout the country and the world. While I spent the first eighteen years of my life here in Louisville, I went seventeen hours away to school for Texas. Then for one of those four years, I traveled thousands of miles away to Germany. After that, I again jumped across the ocean, but of course I had to go somewhere completely different. Now I’m on my way to DC where I repeatedly state I will only stay for a few years before moving elsewhere for grad school and then probably again elsewhere for a career. Different people hold different parts of my history, and it’s doubtful that all of these people will ever be in one place at one time.

I wouldn’t trade my experiences or my friendships. They are who I am. I’ve made my decisions consciously and willingly. I treasure the fact that I can go to so many different places and have friends waiting for me there. I envy my friends who have the consistency of the past as a part of their present and their future, but I wouldn’t be satisfied with it for myself. I have an urge to go that I can’t, at least at this point in my life, ignore. But with every year I realize that in choosing one thing I sacrifice another. It isn’t possible to have it all. You can’t be everything you want to be. I don’t always know that I’m making the right choice, but I don’t feel like I’m making the wrong choice either. I’m not certain that there’s a right or wrong. There are many paths, all of which branch millions of times, and each time you’re only given a moment to choose. Maybe the path I’m on will lead me right back to the home where I started. Maybe it will lead me to a home I have yet to imagine. I have no way of knowing.

Like Bobbie Ann Mason wrote in Clear Springs, "It's an old question - the call of the hearth or the call of the wild? Should I stay or should I go? Who is better off, those who traipse around or those who spend decades in the same spot, growing roots?...We're always yearning and wandering whether we actually leave or not. In America, we all come from somewhere else, and we carry along some dream myth of home, a notion that something – our point of origin, our roots, the home country is out there. It’s a place where we belong, where we know who we are. Maybe it’s in the past…or maybe it’s somewhere ahead…Maybe we'll never find what we're looking for, but we have to look."

And that’s just it. I have to look.