Forty Years and Forty Pounds Later!

"Good friends are like stars. . .you don't always see them, but you know they are there."

                                                         Sorority Picture "Penguins" 1971

 For the past few months, Bob and I have been planning a trip to my hometown, Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Nestled in the Cumberland Mountains, it’s an amazing town, nicknamed “The Secret City” for the role it played during the Manhattan Project. My family arrived in Oak Ridge about twelve years after the end of the war. My father was a research scientist, my mother a homemaker, and I was eighteen months old. The third of four daughters, you can imagine how lively our home was. I spent the next sixteen and half years enjoying the benefits of this unique community, making friends and memories.

When I was eighteen, just out of high school, my father made a move to Maryland, to finish his career with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. My younger sister and I moved with our parents to another amazing town and state. The beautiful area just outside of Washington, D.C. has been my home for the last four decades.  In all those forty years I have only been back to Tennessee a handful of times, but next month there is a special event luring me “home”: my 40th high school reunion.

Social media, Facebook specifically, has allowed me to reconnect with many of my high school friends. When I heard about the reunion I was both excited and nervous. A lot about me has changed in the ensuing years. In many ways, maybe most ways, I’m a very different person. And I quickly realized that reconnecting via Facebook is very different than reconnecting face to face.

As I debated with myself about attending, I was reminded of a fad that many of us enjoyed during our Jr. and Sr. High years called the “come as you are party”. This fad usually involved an early Saturday morning call. Typically the invitee was still asleep, no makeup on, hair in curlers, and still wearing pajamas. Accepting the invitation to come for breakfast meant walking out of the door immediately.  It was fun and funny to see everyone, sleepy-eyed and fresh out of bed, in oversized T-shirts, orange juice can rollers, and fluffy bedroom slippers. Somehow, these spur of the moment get-togethers allowed us to see each other a little more clearly, without the weekday effort put into keeping up, being hip, making the right impressions. In the midst of reminiscing, I realized that reunions are very much like a “come as you are party”—especially as we get a bit older and more comfortable with who we are, where we have come from, and where we have landed. I became excited about attending the reunion.

I feel confident that many of my classmates and friends had similar reactions when they heard about the 40^th. None of us are the same people who walked the halls of ORHS, cheered the Wildcats on crispy fall nights at Blankenship field, danced till midnight at the Civic Center, and applauded each other across the stage the night we graduated. We’ve married, had children, divorced, buried loved ones, survived life-threatening illnesses, found faith, lost faith, and with each experience we’ve changed. We all have scars, some visible, some not; but each wound, and every life experience, has made us the people we are, the people I’m so looking forward to seeing for the first time in many years.

                                              Graduation on Blankenship Field

I’m grateful for the wonderful work the planning committee has done to coordinate a weekend of gatherings. I’m looking forward to seeing the changes made to the high school and sharing the best pizza in the world at Big Ed’s. Most of all, I’m looking forward to the opportunity to reunite with amazing people who shared the unique experience of growing up in a most extraordinary place. No matter how much we’ve changed, our shared memories of early Oak Ridge live on collectively.

                                                      Book Signing, 2013

Bob and I will be driving from Maryland to Tennessee for the big event. I’m still excited, and yes still a little nervous. Look out class of ‘73, here I come forty years and forty pounds later, just as I am! Hoping you’ll be there too, none of us should miss this ultimate “come as you are party”. Let’s roll, Wildcats!