And escape I did. I left this little town and landed at San Francisco State, a campus with 30,000 students. For four years I lived the dream of big city life.
And when I graduated from SFSU, something funny happened. Somehow in the midst of all that urban living I learned about the value of small town life. The city began to feel claustrophobic to me. The noise, busyness, lack of open spaces and need to plan your life around rush-hour traffic patterns had lost its luster. And my life began to meander back toward the place I had come from...the very place I had happily dismissed a few years before.
I didn't land back in Redding immediately. It took me another 8 years after college graduation to make my way home. And when I did arrive, everything felt a little different. The vast majority of my friends had moved to other places. This small town was growing and changing in ways I wouldn't have imagined a decade earlier. And I came to appreciate the incredible collection of natural beauty that I didn't really notice during my surly teenage years.
In the years since I've moved back home, I've also had the good fortune to return to some old and neglected friendships that got lost in the shuffle after high school graduation. (Easy to do in the pre-Facebook era.) Through class reunions and some google detective work, I've reconnected with a collection of high school girls that has grown into a tight-knit circle of deep and connected friends. We get together for our own private reunions every year. We nag at each other so we don't forget to do our mammograms. We laugh until we can't breathe and tears stream down our faces. We check in on each other when life gets hard and celebrate when life calls for a party.
High school was not exactly a bed of roses for all of us. We had our share of carefree, youthful fun, but also we had our fair share of heartbreak, disappointment, teen drama and some life experiences that we wouldn't wish on our enemies. I wasn't the only one who graduated from high school determined to never look back.
And yet, I'm so glad that we did.
Looking back, with the wisdom that only comes from the passage of time, has allowed me to bring forward the best part of my high school experience....the friendships.
Over the years since we have all reconnected and rekindled our friendships, I've been trying to pinpoint the "thing" that makes this circle of friends so precious. As we gather each year and soak in each other's company for 2-3 days, I wonder about the secret sauce that seems to exist among the six of us.
Part of it is our history. When you know someone for 30+ years there is a level of understanding that tends to make things easier. You don't have to explain where you're coming from because they witnessed first hand where you've been. But that's not the whole story. Maybe the more important piece is not just knowing the history, but appreciating and respecting the way that history has shaped us individually and collectively. Perhaps it's the ability to see in each other the more confident adults we have become, and also being sensitive to the small pieces of those vulnerable young teenagers that still live inside all of us.
Back in 1991, when we gathered with our classmates for our senior panoramic picture, one of us wore a shirt emblazoned with the words "So Be It" in huge, black letters. I didn't really get it at the time. She was (is) a little edgy and rebellious, and I just figured maybe that was the point of the shirt....we weren't supposed to understand it.
This past weekend when we gathered for our annual girls reunion, we looked back on that panoramic photo and I wondered once again about that shirt. I didn't get a chance to ask her what exactly that shirt meant to her in 1991. But for me, in 2021, the meaning suddenly became clear. An expression of acceptance. Resignation. Clarity. We don't need to have the answers or a rationale for why "it" works. If it works, we go with it.
So be it.
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| Enterprise High School Class of 1991 |
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| 30 years later 💛 |
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