The More Things Change

Last night I spent a few hours with a hundred of my closest friends. Okay, so they weren’t all that close. They were all from my high school graduating class, and with only the rare exception I had to peer at their name tags (which incorporated a senior photo) to put names to faces. It struck me that there were only a few of us (me included, I am told) who look enough like our forty year-old photo to be recognizable. And yet, once the identity of a person was established, it was uncanny how many of us still bore the remnants of our former selves. The hippies still had that 60’s love child look; the geeks still had the pocket protector look; the jocks and the cheerleaders still seemed to float together on the balls of their feet; the wallflowers were probably still there, although I didn’t notice.

I think the Catholics used to say, “Give us a child until he is five, and we have him for life.” Child psychologist pretty much agree that basic character is formed by then, if not soon after. That being the case, at seventeen or eighteen in our I-don’t-want-to-grow-up society we are all little more than larger versions of what we were in knickers. At that point we head into the “real world” of college or the workplace and forge our identities relative to what’s out there. Free spirits wander more freely and pencil pushers decide who they want to provide them with pencils. Then somewhere around the mid to late twenties our brains stop maturing, so say the psychologists. From that point on, it’s more or less like Mad Max wisely opined, “Wherever you go, there you are.”

I always used to chuckle at how all the “old people” had hair styles and fashions from the 1940’s or 50’s. Looking around the room last night, I realized that, by and large, we all sported coiffures very similar to the photos on our name badges. It causes me to wonder if the class of 2010 will gather in 2050 with the men in spiky dishevelment and the ladies in meticulously messy “beach hair.” Will the guys still be wearing their pants halfway to their knees displaying their boxers for all to see? Will the girls have on skinny little too-short tees with just enough skirt or short to keep you guessing about their underwear? Fashions come and go, but don’t we all snicker at the forty-something moms who dress like their daughters, a who’s she kidding smugness in our attitude?

If there is a message in this it would be for parents of young children: shape your kids carefully; you are molding them for life. It reminds me of that verse from Proverbs, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” The music at our reunion was provided by a reunited garage band, not assembled as such in forty years, doing a remarkably good job bashing out “Wild Thing” and “G-L-O-R-I-A” and tearing me up with “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying.” My high school sweetheart and I even got onto the dance floor and gyrated with the rest of the “kids” from our class. Which made me realize that I spent the night the same way I spent most of my high school years, hanging out with the girl I love, pretty much oblivious to what’s going on around me. The more things change…