Twenty Years

My High School's logo.  Yes I'm aware it looks like a sperm. Trust me, it always has.

My graduating class from Clayton High School had a twenty year reunion this weekend.  I wasn't able to attend due to a last minute "thing," but due to the miracle of Facebook I was at least able to see who was going and who, like me wasn't able to get there.  Then today, during lunch, I ran into a friend from said class who it turns out lives in town and was at the same restaurant with his very expectant wife and two daughters.  (Congratulations again by the way Dave!)

As I finally sat down at the computer this afternoon I pulled up our modern replacement for the Oracle of Delphi (yep, Facebook once again) and spent a few minutes cyber stalking some old classmates just to see what's been going on in their lives.  Not all that surprisingly most of the goofy guys still seem to be goofy, most of the pretty girls are still pretty, and for the most part the people that I hung around with in high school seem to have gone on with pretty normal lives.

On the one hand it seems like the last twenty years has gone by so very quickly, yet when you stop and take inventory of everything that's occurred since 1992 you have to admit that twenty years has also been a very, very long time.  In my little bit o' stalking today I found out that while I have yet to have a kid (that I'm aware of, no surprises please) I actually have two classmates with kids who have graduated high school already!  How does wow even begin to cover that nugget of reality?

I took a step back in my brain to June of 1992 and thought about my life at the time versus now.  I realized that, outside of my parents and two friends, nearly everyone in my daily life lay somewhere in my future at that time.  In June of 1992 I was getting over a recent break up with a trollop of a girlfriend and was planning a beach trip with my best friend at the time.  I had a part time job and a '79 Buick LeSabre that had survived being rear ended by a tour bus with nothing more than a bumper dent.  I was looking forward to finally going to college in the fall and getting away from home.  I was also really, really dumb as human beings go, but I think that goes with the whole eighteen year old territory.   

My little stroll down amnesia alley today made me understand something, however.  Over the course of the last twenty years I've met and been part of the lives of an incredible cast of people from all over the spectrum of walks of life.  I've always been a scribbler of sorts (if you don't believe me I'll show you the file box of comp notebooks) but I wondered what finally got the pot boiling to get me ready to write novels.  Looking back over the last twenty years I saw that it took until the last year of my life for me to have all the raw material I needed to start that process.  I think somewhere around the ten year point in 2002 I started to realize that I may actually have something to say.  A decade later, well, I've been blathering away on this blog for the better part of a year and I'm four weeks away from novel #2.

So, twenty years have gone by since Clayton High School was handing out diplomas in June of 1992.  Have I learned some grand wisdom to share with the rest of the class?  Hardly, but I do have some really good stories to tell...