Jill's Journal: The cliquey class and Room 105
My mind is still swirling with great memories made at my 40th class reunion this past weekend. It’s an event that I’d been looking forward to for months now. Leading up to the weekend gathering, our class Facebook page had been inundated with oodles of photos from the past – from kindergarten on up.
Obviously, four decades after parading into our high school gymnasium to the familiar “Pomp and Circumstance,” we’ve all changed.
I don’t know how many times I heard over the weekend, ‘You haven’t changed a bit.”
Well, yes, I have. And so, have many of my classmates.
Receding hairlines, baldness, grey hair, a few extra pounds … you get the gist. But no matter how time may have changed our physical appearances, I delighted in the fact that we’re still the “cliquey class” that our high school administration tagged us with in our freshman year.
I graduated with a class that numbered just shy of 140. To date, 10 of our of classmates are sadly no longer with us. Some passed way too soon after high school, others in recent years. Illnesses. Accidents. Tragedy. And sadly, suicide are among the various reasons. Although they’re no longer with us, we took the time to remember them all, sharing stories about each of them. Some of the stories made us laugh. Some told of their greatness on the football field or the baseball diamond. Others were comical, including the story I shared about Jimmy Quindel, who offered to weld a kitchen chair that had accidently been broken during a party at my house while my parents were gone for the weekend. Jimmy promised he’d have it back to me first thing Sunday morning. That didn’t happen.
But when I drove into the high school parking lot on Monday morning, there sat our kitchen chair. Welded and repaired.
On Friday evening, we gathered at the local pizza place, Jake’s. Although now operating in what was formerly one of our town’s three grocery stores back in the day, the pizza is still as yummy as I remember it was, while the conversation and giggles flowed freely. We finished off the night at the local Eagles Club, where we gathered up tables and chairs and talked and laughed the night away. Several of my classmates had rooms at the town’s only hotel, and the joke of the night is that everyone who had a reservation was staying in Room 105. That may not have been the entire truth, but it was sure a ton of fun knowing that this “cliquey class” from 1982 remains united – no matter the years or the miles between us.
