Monday, August 28, 2017

We need each other

Laila has started at Bountiful High and I am finally on my LAST high school student.  
This is cause for a LARGE celebration!! Bring on the balloons!

 As I walk back into BHS, I have memories of my own sophomore year.  Laila complains about her crappy drivers ed teacher and I commiserate because I had a crappy one too.  She is excited about the dances and cheering at the games.  I loved the dances too, and went to all of the football and basketball games.  She shakes her head over the kids in her classes who get kicked out the first day of class or who are disrespectful  to the teachers...I lived that too.  The part she loves the most is hanging with all her friends....and what I loved the most was the kids I attended Bountiful High with.  I spent two of those years with my sister Marcie. I met Wayne my sophomore year in my English class. I still see some of my high school friends around town and now with Facebook I have connected with many more.  

I loved my high school years and look back on them fondly and as I Facebook "stalk" my old friends what I’ve discovered is that life has treated us all pretty much the same. The cool kids, the jocks, the cheerleaders, the choir kids, the drama/debate bunch, the parking lot gang, the nerds and even the Homecoming Queen. We've gotten married, never married, gained weight, gone bald, been divorced, never had children, lost children, have children we love to the point of pain, suffered every ailment including cancer, been unemployed and employed in jobs we never thought we’d be doing in a million years.  None of us has lived the life we expected to live when we roamed the halls at Bountiful High.  Some of us are glad for that, others are frustrated, but we are all more humble.  More forgiving of ourselves and others.  More open to not knowing what the next moment holds and feeling grateful we're even here at all because a sad and surprising number of us have already died.  After 30 years, we recognize we're more alike than we are different and in no small part because we embarked on our adult lives at the same moment  -June 1980. 


In thinking back on these times and those people, I realize that we needed each other then and probably still need each other now.

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