Touchstones

Saturday I traveled up, through torrential rain, to my home town.  The Elementary Gym was where the Alumni luncheon was held.

When I consider all the graduates from this school, over the 120 history, there weren't many attendees.  The "youngers" just aren't interested in these hokey, old fashioned kinds of things.

I smiled as the program progressed, led by a prayer, group singing of, "In The Garden" and "Proud to be an American", where every single person stood.  I looked around, every single person, of the 100 present, was singing and praying.  Small town America.  Where else could you get away with this?  I love it!

Pammie was there, only 3 from her class showed up.  Her class was recognized for 40 years, ours was recognized for 60.

When I used to attend these Alumni banquets, they were held at night, we dressed to the nines and there was a dance after the meal.

I used to look at the old graduates and marvel that they were still alive 60 years after graduation.  Now, I am one of those old graduates.

My favorite teacher was there--still alive at 96.  He graduated the year I was born and was celebrating his 78th year from graduation.  He is sharp as a tack and looks as young as me.

Out of 36 graduating in my class, we have 19 survivors and 7 of us showed up.

If I had been smarter in High School, I would have accepted a date with the lovely man standing next to me, hung onto him and married him. He was one of those "late bloomers" and in High School he was kind of goofy, with the blush and sort of stumbling ways.  Now, he is wealthy and one of the kindest, gentlest, sweetest man you'd ever meet.  

Oh no.  I had to go for the popular jock and look where that got me!

The ladies in this photo are some of the ones who do lunch every month.  As you can tell, the one on the left front is not smiling.  We took 5 photos and she is not smiling in any of them.  She appears to us to be getting a bit senile and will say things that she should not.  I can remember, when my grandma first started in with her forgetfulness and senility, she quit smiling too.  Every photo we have of Grandma, in her last few years, she looked very sad and would sit with her head down, looking worried.  This may be happening to our girl.  
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Afterwards, I traveled out to The Farm to visit sister for an hour and then started home.  It was now getting foggy and dark (5:00) and I had a heck of a rough ride getting home.  I never would have made it if I hadn't remembered that in the console of the car, I had those special yellow glasses to use to drive after dark.  I put those on, and it made it seem a bit brighter outside, but it still was a long journey.
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It was a real nice time anyway and worth the scary drive home.  I wondered around the new parts of the school that have been added on since Jennifer was in elementary school.  This gym used to be our  High School gym, but with a burst of residency in the mid 60's, they tore down our two-story brick school, and added buildings for elementary school and built a new middle school and high school up town.

Lots of memories in that gym.  I even sneaked up on the stage, behind the heavy curtain and remembered choir concerts, Jr. and Sr. Plays, band concerts, talent shows--all those memories came back crystal clear.

Yesterday, still feeling sentimental and nostalgic and the fact that we ARE NOT having a 60th CLASS reunion, I got to wondering about those kids that live out of state....and really too far away now to come back home.

I have decided to send them all a letter asking them to write a brief synopsis of their life now and enclose a present photo.  Then, I am going to make up a newsletter with the info from each person and mail that out to everyone.  I used to make booklets for our class reunions, kind of like this, and pass them out at our Class reunions.  We probably won't ever have any more Class reunions and I have this real need to connect to everyone.  To have all of us be connected again.  After all...most of us started Kindergarten together and graduated together.  In a small town school like ours, we all were kind of like brothers and sisters.
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I started my next project.  It is the strangest pattern I have ever worked.  There are only squares with color symbols in them and no out-line of the figures.

Look at all the colors!

I think this project is probably going to be the most difficult one I have ever done.
I have started at the upper, right hand corner, and off I go.