Well, I know you’re waiting with bated breath to hear about my reunion.  In case you missed that column, I went last weekend to the 30th reunion of my high school graduating class.

The diet thing never worked.  I had gained about five pounds by the time the date came, but I wore the outfit I had bought for it anyway even though I had purchased it with the intention of LOSING five pounds.  One of my classmates had read that last column … I had said I wasn’t looking to win any beauty contests but that I hoped people would think, “Hey, Sarah doesn’t look bad.”

“Hey, Sarah!  You don’t look bad, girl,” she said.  That’s a good friend. 

All in all, my classmates have held up really well.  There were 690 in my class, and I’m told about 250 showed up, so there is the possibility that the ones that didn’t hold up so well just didn’t come.  But I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt.

It seems that at the reunion ten years ago, there were a lot of people switching jobs, people with a lot of little kids, and folks whose marriages were on the rocks.  It was a stressful time in a lot of their lives, and you could see it in their faces (mine included).

It wasn’t that way this time.

Now these faces looked to be in a happier place.  The kids (for most of us at least) are almost grown; some have grandkids.  People are remarried.  People were really happy to see each other.  People had smile wrinkles instead of frown lines.

The guys are beginning to look distinguished.  I hate to use that word because it has always been sort of synonymous with “old”, but I can’t find a better word.  The guys who weren’t totally gray were at least getting some at the temples.  But it looked good.

Most of the women, of course, all miraculously have the same hair color they had in high school.  But it looked good, too.

Several of the guys who didn’t wear them in high school had glasses on.  They, too, looked good on the men.

The women wouldn’t be caught dead with glasses on at their high school reunion.  I left mine in my purse, but they made the nametags with really big letters so we could all still read them.  I’m guessing everyone was pretty happy with the big nametags.

And I know that 98% of these people need reading glasses now because that happens around age 40 and we are WAY past that.  Heck, I didn’t even see anyone flip out a pair all night long. 

At one point, several of us were trying to figure out where one of our classmates lived, and we were flipping through the reunion directory to find this person.  Let’s just say that the print in this book was much smaller than the nametags, so this was not an easy task.  As we homed in on the correct page, we sort of passed it amongst ourselves, asking, “Can YOU read it?” 

Not many guys were bald, but the ones that were looked good also.  I didn’t recognize them but, hey, I didn’t recognize a bunch of people.  Even when my memory was good, I couldn’t remember a name, so this event was a real stretch for my little brain.

And people just looked different.  Oh, there were those who you could pick out from a mile away because they didn’t look any different than they did in high school.  But they were the minority.

One guy came up to me, covered his nametag, and said, “Do you know who I am?”

I looked at his face, his eyes, his height.  Nope.  Nothing.  Didn’t ring any bells.

Boy, did he give me a hard time.  We had guy and girl cheerleaders at our high school and this was my cheerleading partner.  We were practically joined at the hip for a year.  Of course, AFTER I knew it was him, it was hard to figure out how I couldn’t have recognized him.  But I didn’t.

I’m already looking forward to my fortieth.  I figure at that one, we’ll all just be happy to be alive.

And I won’t be trying to lose five pounds, either.