Great work, Craig.
My class only had 77 kids in it. We had a 10th anniversary, which was a bizarre gathering of the farm kids, the yuppies-in-waiting, the ones who'd dealt with early failures by growing a drinking problem and a light sprinkling of successful people. The kids I hung out with and considered my closer friends didn't go, for a variety of reasons. The most common feeling I shared with my friends was that we didn't fit in and never would, so why go and take another emotional beating?
There were the expected awkward moments, a couple of startling ones, but most of the time I wondered why I was there. I have almost nothing in common with those people. I learned to fight through adversity in high school and made it through ok, but it was punctuated by some very, very bad times and I have almost no contact with any of them by choice, not by chance.
Despite watching what appeared to be a couple dozen people enjoying themselves, the talk of the 15th anniversary waned. Later on, there was a brief attempt to crank up support for a 20th, but only three people expressed an interest. Our class was the last of the small classes and the beginning of growth in the town. That was a difficult transition and appears to be demonstrated by this complete fragmentation.
Facebook has spawned this weird sort of faux camaraderie. All of our classes were jammed together in a very small school, and there has been this frenzy to befriend people who were even in adjoining grades. Of course, none of this results in any sort of connection, just a linkage of names and changed faces.
Reading their daily (hourly?) postings about the role of religion in their lives, political viewpoints, failing small businesses, debilitating illnesses, etc. makes me want to
slide that last brick into the wall. I consider myself very fortunate to have made it out of there at all.
