<a href="http://www.halfwaytonormal.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/reunion.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-165" title="reunion" src="http://www.halfwaytonormal.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/reunion-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="345" height="258" /></a>
<h5 style="padding-left: 90px;">That's me, sharing some memories with Jody.</h5>
It's already been five days since I attended my high school reunion. In part, I've been taking some time to do the typical human thing: cautiously processing ideas around aging, who I was and who I am, and how I relate (or don't) to these people I grew up with.

As a writer, I've been waiting for The Big Idea: the fabulous metaphor or the unique perspective that will make people chuckle and nod and reflect poignantly.

It wasn't happening. To get myself started, I wrote this on a piece of paper:

My reunion was__________________.

Here are the adjectives I came up with: funny, surprising, surreal, entertaining, short, distracting, awkward, touching, fun, strange, and, for a few brief moments along the way, rather dull.

<strong>In other words, a high school reunion is a lot like life. </strong>Here's my humble dissection of it.<strong>
</strong>
<h4>Getting ready</h4>
You spend a lot of time planning, anticipating and worrying about such an approaching event, even though you know it will be over in a flash. I tried to prepare myself primarily by connecting with childhood friends on Facebook, most of whom I hadn't been in touch with for 20 years. Jody, my best friend through elementary school, even sent me a message to find out what I was planning to wear, which I found very ironic, in a good way.

Two days before the reunion, after Thanksgiving dinner, Jason dug my yearbooks out of my childhood bedroom. I laughed and cringed in equal parts (what were we thinking with that crazy hair?) while pointing out the people I was closest to and sharing stories and memories as they washed over me in unpredictable waves.
<h4>The entrance</h4>
<strong>No matter how great you look, how handsome your husband is, and how pleased you are with your career, you are bound to be seized by a moment of panic and self-doubt </strong>as you walk into a room filled with the little Jimmys and Jens you grew up with. What if we can't find a place to sit with anyone I know? Why don't I recognize this person who's rushing toward me, all excited? What will I talk to everyone about? What if I'm the only one wearing jeans? <em>Why</em> am I the only woman wearing glasses?

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<h4>Grasping for common threads</h4>
Thank God for stories. I mean it. I am thanking the God of heaven and earth for thinking to make us lovers and tellers of stories. I've always known, of course, that people love stories, but I've never really stopped to wonder what it is that's so irresistible about them. Now I'm pretty sure it's this: <strong>We love stories because they connect us to other people, beyond the constraints of time and geography.</strong>

Memories and stories were the lifeblood of the reunion. Jody and I told about the time we let her baby sister slip off of her parents' satin bedspread onto the wood floor; about how her dad always forced me to eat peas; and how we lost the outboard motor in the middle of the lake at her family's cottage.

Zane, who grew up next door to me, talked about the time his older sister took several of us to our first concert ever: The Cars (I think it was 1984). I gave Greg a hard time about how he managed to sneak into every last club photo in our senior yearbook, including the honor's society. During dinner, Jason sat next to the very first guy I ever kissed—7th grade, in the balcony of our small town movie theater. Angie told me I introduced her to makeup (which I have no memory of), and Jen told Jason how I repeatedly saved her butt in biology, particularly when it came to understanding DNA models (again, not something I remember)
<h4>Inevitable surprises</h4>
<strong>Every reunion is bound to include some surprises.</strong> For me, the biggest one was that Pete C. is a pastor. The best sort of pastor, from what I can tell: the kind who's excited about his vocation, and also drinks beer and has a sense of humor. Pete got up to welcome everyone and say a prayer before dinner (yes, I went to the sort of public high school where no one is surprised—let alone upset—by a prayer before dinner). Before he prayed, he said "I know you're all sitting there thinking 'How the hell did Pete end up becoming a pastor?'" I found this extremely funny and refreshing.

Then I found out the second part of the surprise: Pete is a campus minister at Illinois State. That's in Normal, Illinois, the town 45 minutes West of here that inspired the name of my blog. AND he knows two of our favorite people here in Urbana, Nic and Heather, very well. They went through his campus ministry, served in leadership roles, and now go to my church and small group. Jason and I are having both families over for dinner, soon. God clearly loves surprises as much as he loves stories.
<h4>Pure abandon</h4>
After we had squeezed all of the awkwardness, surprise, laughter and catching up that we possibly could out of three or four hours, <strong>there was nothing that sounded better than dancing—to the same music we danced to in the eighties, but with a pure abandon that we couldn't quite grasp at the time.</strong> We were more self conscious then, less sure of who we were, and some of us were trying <em>too</em> diligently to figure out where we fit in.

On the dance floor at the reunion, none of those things seemed to matter. Sure, maybe the cash bar played a role in that. We never had one of those at dances in the high school gym. But we've also had 20 years to work through the question of who we are. And now we know it's a process, not a conclusive goal, and we "fit in" to the bigger picture simply by virtue of starting our journeys in roughly the same place, and making it this far.