Fifty Years

Time flies when you're living life.


Fifty years ago my classmates and I graduated from Molalla High 
School, in a small town in Oregon's Willamette Valley.  There were about 120 of us.  We were a collection from various rural elementary schools, and the big consolidated grade school in town.  Many of us spent all twelve years together, and then upon graduation, we all went our separate ways.


Over the years various groups of us have attended previous reunions.  I have made it to the big tens: 10, 20, 30, 40, and now 50.  In between I have had little or no contact with my classmates, since I moved away to Seattle to go to college and never returned to live, only to visit. A local core has kept us together over the years through our reunions.


In preparation for meeting people I had not seen for many years, I got out my senior yearbook, of course, and my scrapbook of my grade school years.  It is these classmates that I spent all 12 years with that I remember most.

                                 Grade 1

 I was a bit nervous about seeing all of these "strangers", introvert that I am, but I knew I would find my old best friend at some point. I had heard that she would be there.  As we crossed the parking lot, I looked at another couple approaching, then looked again, then stared, I do believe, and then the young face appeared in the older one, and there she was, my best friend Sandra.  I called her name, she looked hard at me, and then we embraced.  We walked in together.

, 

Inside we were soon surrounded by more vaguely familiar faces, including my classmate and neighbor all those years ago, Dave Koch.


Thank goodness all of the classmates had their senior pictures on their name tags.  I think by the time the evening was over I had talked to each one of them.


Our classmate Richard Reasoner was honored for all of the work over all of the years he has devoted to our class and to the Alumni Association.  

 It took some doing to get everyone in the class photo, but I think you can see almost every one's face in this one.  I had my Nikon with me and Tom ended up taking the photos.

It looks like there are 53 of us.  We named those who have passed and missed those who were unable to come. And we all just enjoyed each other.


Age is a funny thing.  We look at old people and think, oh, they are old.  Old people are different.  And then suddenly we ARE the old people, and we know that we are only old on the outside.  Inside we are still those young people who spent our childhoods together.