We survived my 50th high school reunion in San Mateo, California this weekend. It was a hard decision to make: whether to go or not. It’s not natural to put yourself in awkward situations and I only can remember three guys from my class of ’64 that I hung out with.  Fortunately two of those showed up and helped with the ice-breaking. Only 80 out of 500 showed.

The organizers endeavored to collect fifty-year bio’s on the classmates so we’d be caught up on their histories.  Three or four dozen submitted theirs, so I could scan them ahead of time for mutual commonalities. I’m glad we did. There were a number of sailors, one thru hiker and a cyclist who we could seek out to get our conversations started.

We learned an interesting technique for identifying faces in a multitude of people and got to practice it twice.

We did find a couple of surprising encounters with classmates or their spouses: one woman raised her family on a 49′ Swan pretty much in the same cruising waters we sailed, and a spouse who was raised in Farmington, NM, went to law school in Boulder and one of his first jobs was in Durango involving a tourist couple murdered and stuffed in an outhouse in the 60’s.

Most surprising was being embarrassingly reminded of forgotten prom date partners, who I might have gone to middle or dancing school with, and exactly how long I’d dated certain girlfriends. I struck out on most memory challenges. Thankfully not many were obese or appeared like great-grandmothers in my preconceived notion of 68- and 69-year-olds I’d be revisiting.

It was apparent that the people at the various reunion venues were totally unknown to me, the only ones I ever knew were frozen on the pages of the yearbook.  Only one of my two “buddies” was recognizable after 50 years including me. Now I’ll have to recognize them by number.

The school has been greatly upgraded and expanded since we first occupied the brand new building (we were the first class to attend Aragon).  A recent proposition allowed for a new 2-story science building, new 1,700-seat gym, re-designed swimming pools and a 400-seat self-standing theater building among other things. Amazing to tour the grounds again after 50 years and see all the improvements.  Our sophomore guide didn’t get the joke about the “culinary arts” studio (3,000 sqft of mini-kitchens) that has microwaves now, since they weren’t even invented in our time.