For reasons unknown, on my way to work this morning I got to thinking about my high school reunion. It was in 2002 (I can’t remember exactly when) in Safety Harbour, FL.

The aspect I focused on this morning was how dramatically several of the people had changed. Naturally we all build up expectations before our reunion, creating for ourselves a mental picture of those people you knew in high school and then adding 10 years. You think you remember their personalities and the bonds you had with them. You’re not naive enough to think people will be the same, but still optimistic that personalities are mostly static at this point.

I won’t name names because of the power of the cached and spidered Internet, but let’s take four people as examples… we’ll call them A, B, C, and D. All four people are women, and I never had more than a casual acquaintence relationship with any of them.

Ms. A and Ms. B were in the majority of my classes from junior high until graduation. Ms. A was even in my classes in elementary school. Both girls were very sweet, genuinely nice people, and definitely approachable.

Ms. C and Ms. D both first crossed my path in high school. They came from a different junior high. Ms. C was in the advanced program with me so we shared many classes. We were friendly but I wouldn’t have called us friends. We ran with different crowds, though our groups had members in common, which I guess made us friends-in-law. Ms. D I barely knew. We may have had three classes together our high school career, I wasn’t entirely sure she knew my name, and she ran with a jock crowd that was the complete opposite of mine.

Reunion comes along. I’m looking forward to seeing A and B again, and I’m interested in finding out how they’re doing. I get nothing. Both of them. Standoffish, meeting-the-Queen kind of formality. The polite smile, “good to see you again”, “you’re looking well”, but without the twinkle in the eye that signals the emotions are geniune. A bit of a downer.

On the other hand, C and D stun me. Ms. C and I speak for at least 20 minutes or so, catching up on the past, with great back-and-forth conversation. I meet the husband, they seem happy, she’s having a good time… she seems at peace with herself. Awesome, since I felt she was a bit of a lost soul in high school. And it’s the same deal with Ms. D. She appears geniunely glad to see me, asks how I’m doing and what’s been going on, I reciprocate, I meet the significant other, he seems like a nice guy, they both seem happy, and so on. (Bonus: I run into her a month or two later at a local pub and she reacts the same way she did at the reunion.)

So what happened? Well, we never know what’s happening in people’s lives… what the back story is. In a bad relationship? Just having a shitty day? Insecure about where they are in life? Too many bad choices in the last 10 years? Over-medicated? Under-medicated? I think mostly it makes me sad to think that predatory people took advantage of their sweetness in the last 10 years such that the nice and easygoing part of their personality is deeply buried now.

Well, those are my thoughts. It made for an interesting drive to work. I look forward to updating this entry in 6 years, writing that it must have been my sunburn talking and that it was all in my head. Who knows… maybe there’s still too much transition in people’s lives at age 28 for their true personality to shake out.