20 years

It is 20 years since I left highschool ... how scary.

My class had a reunion, in my absence of course, on August 16th, and although I thought nothing of it at the time, since I was on the invitation mailing list, I have been flooded this weekend by emails from those who attended, including one email with photographs of the actual event.

Naturally, despite the fact that I probably would not have gone to the thing even if I had been in the same country that it was being held in at the time, my curiosity got the better of me, and I went to look at the pics of the event.

My first reaction was - who the hell are these people? It took me a long time to recognize most of them, although one or two still look the same. Fortunately, they were wearing name tags, otherwise I would have been totally lost.

One of my former classmates has set up a facebook group for the Class of 88, and I debated long and hard before joining, but finally I realised that there were actually people in the group who I'd missed being in touch with.

There were around 1200 people at my highschool, divided into six years, each year having around 7 classes, and although in the first year we pretty much stuck to our classes, once we started taking elective courses and getting involved in other activities, we mingled more and I guess I would have been social with more than half of the 200 in my year.

But after highschool, I lost contact with most of them, since much of what we had in common had simply been six years of schooling in a shared environment. The school was not a Jewish school, and I found myself gravitating to a more Jewish social circle at university. Later on, I moved to Israel which of course effectively severed any ties that were not strong enough to withstand the distance. Now, however, I'm feeling awash with nostalgia and I've found myself searching for former classmates with reckless abandon. I'm not even sure why, but something in me wants to know, I guess, that they're doing ok. I know of one former classmate who passed away, and I guess I just want to check that the rest of them are still alive.

I'm not even sure why I'm blogging about this, given the absolute paucity of entries on this blog this year. Perhaps this is just my way of slipping back into the swing of the whole bloggitude of it all.