Memorial Day

A decade ago I graduated college with my Bachelor of Arts Degree in history and journalism. With my history degree I was taught that to understand where we are now and where we are headed in the future, we first must understand where we have been. Thus my best friend had a difficult time understanding my reluctance and near allergic reaction to attending my ten year college reunion.

The idea of any reunion of course is to catch up with people that played a significant part of your life at one time. It is a time to find out what they have been up to while at the same time boasting about all of your very own achievements. My own personal philosophy has been to stay in touch with the people who I wanted to stay in touch with and all the rest it doesn't so much matter to me where they are now at.

College for me was an enjoyable experience. It was so liberating to spend four years at an institution where the occupants were not people from the same geographic location like the rest of my educational career, but rather people who like myself were on a quest for experiencing the freedom of new and different points of views, concepts and ideas from an institution of higher learning. It was a wonderful situation to live and learn with people from all over the world, from many different values and backgrounds.

Still, where I am at today has less to do with my years in college and more to do with the experiences and relationships I've had in the ten years since graduation day. There were several significant moments and memories from life in college and from those experiences I spent some time dealing with the aftermath, but at one point you do have to let go and move on, stripping away and rebuilding to get to the next path you are destined to follow. The last thing I wanted to do was to relive any of that, to spend time catching up with people I vaguely recall, reminiscing about what we all did all those years ago.

So as I ate dinner with classmates from both coasts, in a place that previously was the host of a very painful moment, catching up on our present lives and at times dredging up our lives from the past it began to occur to me that some of us have done better at moving on and some of us remain stuck in some other time. My own feelings from those days are long since past. The marriages, the divorces, the job promotions, the fizzled careers, the investments, the gains and losses left some of us a little better and some of us a little worse for the wear. As we gathered for the inevitable group photo it didn't even bother me that a pair of eyes might some day look at the photograph with wistfulness and sentimentality and with that regretful those were the days mentality.

It was with some pride that your local high ranking government official and part time editor of everyone's favorite neighborhood weekly publication survived the weekend with his facilities still somewhat detached. What has become my regular routine these days, though maybe not considered by some as much of a life, does create a certain degree of personal satisfaction. Amongst the clatter of conversation and drinks, as cigarette smoke circled the room, I stood with the rest of the name tag wearing Class of '87, some sporting ever graying and in some cases receding hairlines and expanding waistlines, I discovered though I may not have gotten as far as some, my own experiences and development over the past ten years is about as far as I could have gotten out of these often weary bones. In other words I am as much David as I can possibly be which may not mean much to someone I lost contact with ten years ago, but means a lot to the ones that matter most now days.

While it was somewhat fun to see faces that have long since faded from memory and spend time with some I don't get a chance to see anymore, what was even more fun was to come to appreciate my current situation all the more. Most days I am where I want to be. You work a little, you gain some, you lose some, you grow a little and fall back once in a while and still end up standing tall (or as tall as five foot five allows) and feeling a bit blessed with your own little corner of the world. And at the end of the weekend you look forward to catching up again with some of the same folk in say, another ten years, because who knows what lies around the next corner.