Past Midlife

Two months ago we talked about high school the way we were and the way we are. We compared notes about life, about children, and where our separate roads took us. There were about 40 of us then, and we laughed well into the night.

Today, a fourth of that group sat in stony silence as Msgr Pax echoed our collective--if unspoken--goodbyes. We had come to pay our last respects to one of our own, in a reunion that had us weaving past and present and the myopic future.

Reunions--planned or unplanned--have a way of making us stop for a moment, look back and take stock of our lives thus far. If 75 is a lifespan, we are way past midlife. We have in fact the license to take it slow.

And so it is that we have come to this: jumping from weddings to funerals, seeing the wisdom in buying surreal estate, giving up jobs, honoring tradition. We are neither too young--nor too old--for superstition and so we let it be. We go with the flow. We circle and cycle.

And, we make plans to meet again.