Our Bishop Alemany High School 55th Year Reunion, for the Class of 1968, is Now Complete – And the Cake was Decorated in Our School Colors of Garnet & Gray
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Our 55th year high school reunion is now over. The venue was perfect for the size of our gathering, the cake was decorated in our school colors of garnet and gray, and we were all reluctant to leave when it was over, conversations and small gatherings spilling out into the parking for almost an hour.
As part of the planning for our reunion, we decided to solicit written life testimonies/memories from our classmates to become part of a final electronic Commemorative File that we would produce at the closing of the reunion. Also, as part of the Commemorative file, the Reunion Committee members were asked to share their parting thoughts on the reunion. Mine is below.
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Our Bishop Alemany High School 55th year reunion, for the class of 1968, is now complete. And as I sit in my family room, looking out the windows towards the street considering what to write, my mind goes back to our high school days and to our graduation from high school fifty-five years ago – folks, more than half a century ago! And my mind comes to center and rest upon the similarity, for me at least, between our high school graduation and the closing of this 55th year reunion. Our graduation from high school, of course, closed a very formative part of my life, but the closing of this reunion, I sense, is really something of a different magnitude than my graduation from high school.
For both events, but especially the reunion, it seems to me, have closed significant eras of my life, producing closures much weightier than just turning a page or ending a chapter. Now, these closings were similar on the surface – both quiet and in a sense unremarkable within the grand scheme of my life, as sound barriers and world records were not broken – and also similar with the sense that with neither was there a feeling of end, but only of opening. For when I graduated from Alemany, I knew where I was going, on to college – University of California, Riverside, with a four-year scholarship – and the completion of our 55th reunion also produced a sense of opening, but in a much deeper sense, one endowed with a confidence of a continuing future, and one filled with a desire and a hope for ever deepening ties with family and friends, for even more meaningful work in my writing and life, and for a deepening understanding of the presence of the Lord – and not just for four years, but now with my eyes upon the horizon of faith and hope, the vision of this opening just stretches on and on…on to even beyond the horizon.
And so, one major difference between these two events in my life is that with this latest closing and opening, I have so much more confidence in my life and its direction than when I graduated from high school, as I now know volumes more of myself and what I have been given of life, of love, and of God and His ever-present grace and lovingkindness.
And I do pray and hope for many more years, and the only provision and request I have made for my hopefully very future demise, is that when I am buried, I wish that my son’s ashes be placed in my hands, and that the gravestone will be engraved with my and his name and dates, so that whoever passes by will know that my son had a name, Jarrett Christopher, and that I loved my son, as I loved my three daughters, and that I never forgot him all the days of my life.
And for you, my high school classmates, I wish, and I will pray for all of you for years of life, and a drawing ever closer to the presence of God, the fount of every blessing. For one thing that struck me on the actual night of the reunion was the goodness that emanated from many, that lit and colored our gathering together with a grace that was probably just a faint glow when we were together in high school, for back then, what did we know of life, or love, or the power of goodness, kindness, and understanding towards others?
And in the testimonies of the lives we read of and observed at the reunion, we recognized the gift and blessings of these graces in their lives and in our own, for we all have been battered, bruised and injured along our way – that is just the process of life – but now, what we have acquired and learned over the years, seems all the more essential to hold on to and share, for we face a world darkening in many ways, but it is the one in which we, and those we love and cherish, and those we just pass momentarily upon the street, live and move in, and all these others will indeed need even the modicum of the love and protection and kindness we can offer, to lighten the burdens of their lives.
For I really believe that goodness and kindness will endure as testimonies of our lives, blessings that we can give to a desperately needy and broken world, blessings we can offer others, to persons, one-by-one, to those created in the image and likeness of God.
We were taught this in school. In grammar school, we learned the two great commandments – Love God with our whole heart, mind, and strength & Love your neighbor as yourself. At Bishop Alemany, we began to see these commandments lived out in the lives of some classmates and teachers, perhaps to a degree even in our own lives, and now we can pursue these commandments as they together form the truest definition of life, a good and blessed life, and a life within us that we can continually gift to others. This is what I saw in our gathering at the reunion, and I will pray for all of us that this increases and permeates every area of our lives as we continue on our journey through life. And…perhaps our journey will lead us to a 60th year reunion, in another five years.
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Nice Chris! As I graduated from East Lansing HS and attended Alemany HS with you for 2 years, I did not attend, but thought of all of you this summer. Thank You for your thoughts & impressions. Your Friend, as always. Steve