I can never understand when people say that they don't want to attend their high school reunion. I had so much fun in high school and I have so many great memories.
I look at these pictures of myself from 20 years ago and I feel like they were taken just yesterday.
If given the chance, I wouldn't tell myself anything about how life would turn out. All the good, the bad, and the ugly that has happened over the last 20 years has brought me to this point and I can't imagine being anywhere else.
There were, of course, those embarrassing moments in high school. Like our senior English teacher who made us wear a Kermit the Frog puppet on our head on our birthday. (If you look close, I am wearing a Ricky Van Shelton concert t-shirt that I got when we went to the Alabama / Ricky Van Shelton concert at OSU. How many of you remember him?)
I always had the best Halloween costumes. When you are blessed to have a mother who can sew just about anything, you learn to take advantage of it. This photo would reappear at my high school reunion.
I also always had a homemade prom dress. I loved this and was proud to tell everyone that I had a one-of-a-kind dress. On more than one occasion my dad had to entertain my prom date while my mother finished sewing me into my dress in the back bedroom.
This was Junior/Senior prom my sophomore year. I got to attend because my date was a junior. The other couple in the photo are my friend Colynn and my cousin Troy.
This is Junior/Senior prom my senior year. I went with my friend Chad. Chad and I had been friends for all of high school and it seemed fitting to go together. After prom, we drove up to Portland and watched the OMSI laser light show to Pink Floyd.
But my favorite prom memory is from Homecoming my senior year.
Walking out on the football field during halftime of a football game with my dad is one of my all-time favorite life memories. (No, I didn't win. Jane Scheie did. But it was enough to just be nominated!)
My freshman year was clouded by the school flag controversy. For the entire school year, there was a huge debate about changing our school flag to something other than the confederate flag. This newspaper article is from the beginning of my sophomore year.
It wouldn't be until the middle of my junior year before the confederate flag would be taken down from the school gym and replaced with a custom designed flag. We were so young and naive. We couldn't associate this flag with the history that it represented. We could only see that the system was trying to take something away from us. Looking back as an adult it's easy to see that the right decision was made.
Every year the class took their official photo in front of the tree that the first class planted in the courtyard. This was a tradition that would only be changed when vandals cut the tree down a few years ago.
Can you find me in this photo?
Look close.
Immediately following our graduation ceremony, the parents put us on buses and took us up to Portland for an all-night party aboard the Portland Sternwheeler. The next morning they brought us back to a local park in Albany where we had a little final ceremony and released balloons.
Flash forward 20-years:
Remember how you thought everything was so big when you were a kid and then you go back and you realize that it was just normal size. A walk down memory lane would not have been complete without visiting the place that gave me such great memories.
The class tree was gone, and in it's place was a beautiful flower garden.
Oh to be 18 again!
I never could have imagined how nervous I would be. What if nobody recognized me? What if I couldn't remember other people's names?
People did recognize me. I did remember everyone's names. But the nervousness didn't wear off; and I was not the only one. When the formal part of dinner was done, and the emcee said that we had two hours to go until the next scheduled event, everyone just sat there. No one got up to mingle. No one got up to get another drink at the bar. No one moved! It was so obvious it was funny.
Finally, John Barnes (who was always the outgoing one of the class) got up and silently walked to the front of the room. He took the microphone and looked out at all of us. He said that if no one was going to mingle, he was going to call us all up one at a time and ask us questions about our life. It took a few people being called up before people started volunteering to go up.
Everyone was grateful that John did this. It was so much fun hearing about where people are and what they are doing with their lives and their families. It made it much easier to "mingle" later.
The turnout was not the best, but those of us that did attend had a great time.
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