If any of you are debating on whether you want to attend our 50th Class Reunion this article may help you decide.  Although it is a reflection of a 20th Class Reunion the same could be said, it not more so, for our 50th. 

I hope you will decide to attend and will fill out the Reunion Survey.

Too many trips down memory lane will traumatize you.  It will dissipate you.  The constant wallowing in what was and what could have been will hurt your soul and cause the present to feel less valuable. I firmly believe you can never go home.  But for one evening you can at least go back and see where and with whom you started.   

Looking at old yearbooks You see images frozen in time, of people that no longer exist as you remember them.  Images of people young – so young- not as mature as we thought we were; yet at the time we thought we knew it all.  High School is the framing experience of our life.  We attended high school and we all left high school in dire need of something, yet we didn’t know what it was.   

What each of us got out of high school is difficult to gauge.  I can’t remember even one isolated obscure fact from any one of my high school classes.  But what I did take out of high school was confidence and an unshakable belief in myself that if I put my rear end to the chair and studied, or even ran more laps, or did more work, I would succeed.  You can’t put a price on that.

Through the accident of being born the same year and the circumstances of our parents living in the same locale, we all got to walk the same streets, climb the same steps, sit in the same seats, and look at the same walls.  That is the human school experience.  What we did in the meantime, whether we admit it or not, bonded us forever.  At this stage of our lives a realization should be settling in.  There will be people that you may never see again, yet you will carry their memory and love them till the day you die.  So in the end your reunion just may be your last chance to wave to the crowd that has long since moved on.  For someday there will be no class to reassemble, no one left to hold a reunion.   

In our ten-year reunion program there was an excellent poem by Tony Farmer.  Quoting the last line it said, “Me? I am still the same silly fool.”  Anthony, I know what you are saying and you are not alone, you are not alone.                                             

                                Dr. Osborne is a podiatrist.  His office is located on the Norwood/Pleasant Ridge border.