Bill's Blundering Blog: The Spring-Ford Class of 1976 Impromptu Reunion

The Class of 1976 Spring- Ford Golden Rams

(ok so maybe not the best likeness he looks more happy than fierce)

I start working on this post as I have just downed 5 of Mel Schrader's Chocolate Peanut Butter sinful cookies! Mel knows how to make a cookie :-)

So it is the day after the impromptu Class of 1976 reunion - not official but for how it came together well attended. Tom Adams, Paul Jefferies and I all agree that this was the best case scenario for a reunion. Relaxed and informal -

Tom Adams (sorry Tom it's dark) Robin DiCola and Paul Jefferies

Cheryl's home and pool area was the perfect spot for such a gathering and I am sure that everyone attending is so grateful that she hosted this event.

Joyce Beck, Cheryl Carr, Robin DiCola The Pool (Jim Kelly bottom right)

We have all grown and changed and are much smarter - but we still have our quirks that made us who we were in high school :

Liinda's laugh, Mel's sensibility, Eileen and Cheryl's sense of humor, Becky's deep and brooding insight, Tonya's out going personality, Janet's infectious smile, Carol's knowing looks, Jim smile (smirk) knowing look (not sure how to describe it), talking to Paul and finding out that he should have his own comedy show, Bruce is as nice as he was in high school, Kathy's warmth and caring, Debbie's laid back attitude, Robin's loyalty and sense of humor, and Cheryl's amazing light. I think I caught everyone I talked to, and sadly because of my own cooking horrors, I arrived later than planned.

I think as we talked yesterday we all realized that, because back then no one really talked about their home life out loud - not like today - that many of us were going through some really difficult times. Interesting to realize that or maybe think that this why these people may have acted or treated people the way they did. One classmate who terrorized me through Jr. High School - and I mean to the point of taking the long way around to avoid him or not going to the restroom at certain times because he might be there, decided that taking his own life was a better alternative to the "who knows what kind of hellish life" he may have been living. We didn't find out until much later in our lives that our classmates had children we did not know about, marriages we did not know about, personal situations we did not know about, substance abuse issues, teachers who actually provided substances to their students because they thought it was cool. Yes, it was a different time from today.

Students are so much more forthcoming with their personal hells and are able to get help now. Where was the help we needed when we needed it? So maybe we all need a sense of forgiveness towards these people because we did not know the heavy loads they carried with them day in and day out. Ours was not quite the Donna Reed generation - they are older than us - but we may have been part of the Leave it to Beaver generation - We believed that everything was ok. Obviously it was not.

Because I am the kind of person that I am it, in retrospect, makes me sad that we were not able to better communicate with each other. Or maybe feel safe enough or secure enough in ourselves to communicate with each other when some of us really needed to be able to be honest with our friends. Yes we were young and invincible, but we quickly learned that we were not. To my knowledge most generations have not been. Some generations have been stronger than others but never invincible.

Thankfully we were able to admit around a table yesterday that we were all insecure in who we were, who we wanted to be, much less how to get there. Many of us may have been the first to attend college or even have had the option to attend college as many of our parents' did not. My father had an 8th grade education and my mother was a graduate of secretarial school. Surprising,that in my family, my siblings and I all went to college and all became teachers. Perhaps, despite my own insecurities, confusion, and lack of real guidance from my parents I managed to make away for myself. Many of us did not have that chance. One class member shared that he had a baseball scholarship to Mansfield, but his own lack of direction coupled with his father's lack of valuing an education kept him from attending. I am not sure you would see that happening as much today.

Even talking about the loss of classmates to tragedies was difficult. Remembering these special men and women and what they lost and those around them lost by being taken from us all to soon. It is always sad when a teenager loses his or her life. It is not how life is supposed to be.

But at least there is the present and the future. Hopefully these friendships, for some that have been reforged, will help provide that support that we lacked growing up. I liked what Mel said about being able to nurture some of these new - old friendships.

I think of the Simon and Garfunkel Song - "Old Friends" - I know the words were really probably written to describe the later years of Simon and Garfunkel or what they observed walking through Central Park in New York. The idea of two (men in this case) people meeting in the park for years and watching the years go by. Who would have ever thought that at 70, they would still be meeting. For me this suggests that yesterday was about old friends getting together again, for some, after many years.

So to all my classmates from the Class of 1976 Spring-Ford High School Golden Rams - I raise a glass (ok coffee cup) to toast a really wonderful evening with some "Old Friends!"

I leave you with the words to "Old Friends" and some pictures of the reunion

Old friends,
Sat on their park bench
Like bookends.
A newspaper blown through the grass
Falls on the 'round toes
On the high shoes
Of the old friends.

Old friends.
Winter companions,
The old men
Lost in their overcoats,
Waiting for the sunset.
The sounds of the city,
Sifting through trees,
Settle like dust
On the shoulders
Of the old friends

Can you imagine us
Years from today,
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange
To be seventy.
Old friends,
Memory brushes the same years,
Silently sharing the same fear...