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Reunions and Social Networking
By Beau on Wednesday,  22 JULY 2009  /  Posted in ,
My family moved around a lot when I was a kid. I was born in Alabama, lived mostly in Oklahoma and finished up my High School education in Colorado. Last weekend was the Chickasha High School class of 1989 reunion and this coming weekend is the Durango High School class of 1989 reunion. Both of which I had tentative plans to attend but thanks to the economy, I have had to cancel on both.

I didn't really go to any 10 year reunions because I honestly would not have not have even known anything about it. And frankly, would have had a hard time remembering most of the people there.  When you have to adapt to as many environments as I have, you have to make room for new faces and names to index over the old ones. This isn't to say the old ones weren't important, but you prioritize to the now when you have to get to know a whole new school of people four times over, not including two universities and two branches of service as well as countless jobs.

As I said, I didn't go to the ten year reunion in Chickasha, but I was invited by a friend to attend the homecoming football game that many of the reunion alumni were going to. I saw a few people there I vaguely remembered and talked to a few of them for a bit, but there wasn't a big impact really. I had a pretty good job then, but was in a rut as far as life giving me everything I was wanting out of it.

So twenty years, holy crap!  It had been twenty years since graduation and that's a long time. But as people were connecting on FaceBook and showing pictures of them and now and all the fun group pictures in High School, It occurred to me it had been much longer for me. My friends and acquaintances were still 9th graders in my eyes because that was when I last saw most of them.  People I once knew had gone on living and growing when I left that school and there was the evidence. Despite your brains best effort to make you think those people are still the same from when you last saw them, they were busy having their lives and growing as people too.

In the end, my moving around so much had a few effects on me, it made able to adapt to new surroundings, but in return, it made me lose a bit of my past. It also made me lose a piece of me that roots itself in it's past. These people, no matter how distant now, had a big impact in forming my opinions on the world and how I see things. In all the places I went to. And yet in my ability to adapt I had nearly dumped all those memories years ago.

I'm thankful for the social media networks for giving that to me, for letting me have my past back. To reconnect to people I knew for years, or for a brief time of my life that was important to me. I'm happy to reconnect to these people and see they aren't the same kids I last saw either. It's been enlightening on many levels and it's given me back a piece of myself.


Tags: Chickasha, Colorado, Durango, FaceBook, Networking, Oklahoma, Reunions, School, Social Media, Woodward
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