I'm feeling old

The other day I received an e-vite from a high school friend I lost touch with after graduation. She is trying to get the old high-school gang back together for a reunion at Thanksgiving and is operating under the assumption that we might just all be back home then. It struck me as funny because I didn't even know that half the people on the list had email addresses. Back in high school, the internet as we know it today did not exist; we didn't have cell phones; and my college dorm room was one of the few on my campus that actually had a phone jack in individual rooms rather than a pay phone down the hall.

The point of this is not to start some sort of "and then I walked to class 5 miles in the snow" rant. Rather, I think it explains why we lost touch. It just wasn't easy to stay in touch back then. You kept up with people you saw everyday and the others tended to fall by the wayside. We would see each other on occasion when we all came home for a holiday break, but even then it wasn't the same. We had missed the details of each others lives along the way. You would think that now with the advent of our modern communication devices that we would keep in touch now. I mean is there ever a day that I leave the house without a blackberry and cell phone? And if I do, I go back for it. I think the real problem is that once too much time goes by, it becomes harder to reintegrate into lives that have moved on. We've all changed tremendously and our lives have gone different directions.

Still, I'm curious to see a lot of these people. Unlike a regular reunion, I don't have any feelings of wanting to see the really bitchy girl turn out to be a complete failure or anything like that. I'm looking forward to seeing where life has taken my old gang. I heard one friend is a cardiologist now and that another has moved to Russia and is opening a hotel somewhere in the middle of nowhere. I've seen some of these people more recently at weddings, but not everyone as those guest lists are always limited to the still nearest. I wonder if people are happy and I hope they are. I wonder if we'll act as silly as we did back then because that's what we know. I wonder if I'll feel old. Probably. A lot has happened since we all met in 1988.