
With the new year comes a milestone event – this will be my 45th year of graduating from high school. What a thought, what a long time ago, how old we all are now. All of us people who graduated in 1979 from a huge Catholic high school in Calgary.
I graduated with nearly 800 people and only knew a few hundred of them by name, and then only had a passing interest in a few dozen of those. I wasn’t a snob – I was just not very interested in school, I’m afraid. Funny, given that I spent the bulk of my career in a school division! All of us in that graduating class were pretty uninvolved, it seemed, because there has only been one reunion and that was 35 years ago. Last time we came together was for our tenth reunion and it was pretty boring, when all was said and done.
School itself didn’t engage me much and my social group had come to be people from outside of school, too, so there wasn’t much of a draw in that regard. I was working a lot in a ladies clothing store at Market Mall and had friends there. And I was hanging out with my sister’s friends who were three years older than me and doing much more interesting things than the people at school. Their group was much more connected with school and that graduating class of 1976 has planned and successfully hosted many reunions over the years – including a couple that my sister helped with on the organizing committee. That group were keeners, for sure, compared to us deadbeats.
The group I did hang out with seemed to be a bunch of people dreaming about being anywhere but there. Unlike a subsection of my grade who enjoyed school and each other so much they all married one another. They bought houses and raised kids just a few blocks from school, where they themselves grew up. I wonder if these 45 years seems even longer to them.
This whole idea made me think of my 45th birthday, which was when I first became enthused about this anniversary year because we had a lot of fun at my party. A bunch of gals gathered our little 45 records at my place and we played them on a hard plastic suitcase-style record player we found. Just like the ones they would have originally been played on in our basement rumpus rooms. One lady brought her collection in a round purple plastic carrier the same size as a 45. It came complete with a wrist strap and tassel. Another came with fully alphabetized collection, with an accompanying chart with lists according to song, artist and year produced.
It was such a scream! We danced and sang to everything from Bobby Sherman and The Monkees to Lulu and Janis Joplin. There were balloons and noisemakers, and lots and lots of wine. We even had the round yellow centres that still popped out from the middle of the 45s when we tried to place them on the turntable. So many memories came back to life and it was a super fun night! Surely I could roll up my sleeves and plan something fun for our school’s 45th reunion. I’d gather the handful of people I still keep in touch with and we’d put something together, I thought, until I mentioned this plan to my sister.
She stopped me before I could even get the complete thought out. “Sandy,” she said, “your 45th anniversary of graduation was last year.”
Keener.