Letter to Non-Attendees

An Open Letter to the Non-Attendees

It was a mistake. Now don't get me wrong. It wasn't a life-changing mistake like misjudging your speed while rounding a rain-slicked curve on the Interstate. Or putting all your savings on the wrong e-commerce stock on Wall Street. Or allowing your brother-in-law to move in to the spare room at the back of your house because he said it would only be "temporary".

It was just a bad call on my part, one that I would come to regret. You see I decided not to attend our 40th class reunion. Skip McDaniel had talked to me about it several times. He said that since I was living in Mobile, only an hour away, it wouldn't be a problem attending..... except that I let my ego get in the way. I looked in the mirror and saw that my hairline was continuing to recede while my beltline continued to expand. My memory was not what it used to be and some of those things that I thought I remembered were probably expanded (or reduced) by the winds of time. So I decided not to go. After all, I had only attended Gulfport High for my Junior and Senior years and didn't have a history in the school system like most of my classmates. Like all decisions in life, you can justify either choice with just a little bit of rationalization. So I told my wife that we weren't going. And we didn’t.

And normally, that would have been the end of it….. but fate stepped in. I had been doing business with a company in Munford, Alabama and, through a series of unrelated events a couple of weeks after the reunion I learned that the owner was none other than classmate Don Johnson. On a business trip to his plant he suggested that we fly back down to the Coast in his plane to attend a fish fry being held by classmates. I thought it would be a neat thing to do so on Tuesday night we flew back to Gulfport where Skip picked us up.

I didn’t really expect to recognize anyone; after all, it had been over forty years. But I was wrong. I recognized many (and some I would never have recognized if they hadn't walked up and introduced themselves). I talked to people I hadn't seen in four decades….. And I had a great time. I can’t say it was like 1961 again, there was just a little too much gray and middle to pull that off, but it was a great time. And I realized just what I missed by not attending the reunion. I missed a return to a kinder, gentler time, when getting a date for the weekend or hoping you did well on a pop-quiz were the biggest problems most of us faced. I missed sharing the successes and failures, marriages and divorces, and children and grandchildren with people who were important in my life many years ago.

Now I wrote this letter for all of us who didn’t attend because we decided that our lives were too busy, or we were too fat/thin/bald/wrinkled/lame/forgetful, or that we were beyond all of this, or..or.. any other excuse we could come up with. I can only urge you to follow this suggestion. The next time we get a notification that the class is going to get together, cinch up your belt, grease up your flattop, dig out your black flat pumps, and do what ever is necessary to get there. You owe it to yourself and to everyone else in the class to show up. After all, how else will you be able to see how much everyone has aged and how young you still look?

Robert Lewis