The Gift of Today

A few years ago, my wife and I attended our 50th high school reunion. We had not seen the vast majority of our former classmates since graduation and were looking forward to reconnecting with friends from our past.

When we entered the large ballroom, our first impressions were that we had wandered into a Senior Adult convention. The crowd mingling in front of us appeared to be rather elderly, maybe Golden Agers out on an excursion. But then we saw the banners and school colors and knew that we were in the right place after all. My, how all of our classmates had changed!

At a reception desk we met a women who welcomed us. I glanced at her name tag and recalled a girl I had sat next to in Geometry class. The more she talked, the more I realized it was the same person. She didn’t have a clue as to who we were and dutifully handed us name tags as there were a number of people in line behind us. We wrote our names on them and stuck them on our shirts. She studied the writing on the labels for a moment and then looked up at our faces, then back down to the name tags. She broke into a smile and said, “Mike Riley and DeDe. So good to see you guys! I would recognize you anywhere. You haven’t changed at all!”

As we walked off, my wife whispered to me, “She’s lying through her teeth. She still doesn’t recognize us.” It was only then I realized we blended right in with the Golden Agers!

We roamed through the room searching for name tags of people we had been familiar with in high school and meeting others with whom we had only been vaguely acquainted. I noticed that everyone was looking at the name tags before they looked up at the faces. Even the name tags, however, didn’t always stir recognition. Sometimes, only as we began talking to people did we fully recognize their identities. What finally gave them away was that, although their faces and bodies had changed, they were the same kids they were 50 years earlier.

The athlete who lived and breathed football in high school was at a table with other former jocks rehashing his exploits on the field. His appearance was vastly different from the well-built defensive tackle I remembered. Now he was extremely overweight but just as self-centered as he was in high school. I sat down with my old teammates for a while, and we listened to him tell one football story after another. Whenever someone in the group tried to change the subject, he always brought it back to football.

After growing tired of hearing about his football heroics, many of which had been greatly embellished, I moved to another table where there was loud laughter. The clown of our Senior Class was the center of attention, as he always had been. The jokester, who was forever pulling pranks, usually on a student from the freshman class, had not changed at all. He teased and regaled us with stories of his four marriages that had everyone in stitches. He had gained several pounds since high school and had lost most of his hair but he was the same person I had known since the 9th grade.

So many of my high school classmates had changed very little over the previous 50 years or so. Outwardly, of course, we had all changed, but the personalities were remarkably similar to the way they had been back in their school days. I shouldn’t have been surprised. By the time most of us reach our high school years, our personalities have been largely shaped. To be sure, they continue to mature well into our 30s but the basic traits remain the same.

That doesn’t mean, however, that we can’t still change for better or, sometimes, for worse. Many of my classmates who had been subpar students in high school, who no one thought would amount to anything, became successful later in life. And a few, who everyone was convinced would rocket up the corporate ladder, failed to reach the first rung.

There are many reasons why some people succeed while others fail to live up to expectations. Traits like ambition, work ethic, talent, and intelligence certainly play a part but are not always the decisive factor. A failed marriage can set back or even ruin a promising career. Health issues can also factor in a life that never reaches its potential. An unforeseen tragedy can derail our goals. And then, of course, there is luck, or the lack of it, that can alter life’s trajectory. Some people just seem to never catch a break.

One of my classmates, someone I had known well, wanted to be a surgeon but his dream never became reality. I spoke with him for a long time after the reunion had broken up. He was an excellent student in high school and college and was accepted to medical school, but he was never able to attend. A series of events occurred within his family that prevented him from ever accomplishing his goal. He had not let the experience embitter him, though, which pleasantly surprised me, but he still harbored, way down deep inside, a wistfulness of what might have been.

I’m sure many of us have similar feelings about what might have been. The “if onlys” haunt all too many of us. Life doesn’t always reward us with our first choice. We have to make do with our second, third, or even fourth choice. That’s life! But settling for life’s second best doesn’t mean that we have failed. Not by a long stretch. The fact is, life’s second best doesn’t have to spell failure at all.

The popular Country Western singer Garth Brooks prayed in high school that God would grant him his wish of marrying a certain girl. To his disappointment that prayer went unanswered. Years later, at a high school reunion, when he met his high school dream girl again, he realized she had not been the right person for him. His 1990 hit song “Unanswered Prayers” tells the story that sometimes the prayers that God doesn’t answer ironically fulfill our deepest longings. 

How we respond to disappointment is what makes or breaks us. If we surrender to self-pity and spend our lives feeling sorry for ourselves, we have only compounded the problem. Life knocks everyone down. What matters is whether we get back up. It’s okay to remanence from time to time of what might have been—to share war-stories at a high school reunion, for instance—but we can’t live there. We fail when we get stuck in the past, unable to move on.

We enjoyed visiting with my classmates from high school. The reunion brought back memories and reconnected us to people who had played significant roles in our lives as teenagers. It was an enchanting past to visit for a short while, but not a place to stay. We appreciate the past, and there’s no harm revisiting it on occasion. After all, we can learn from the past, but the past is not where we want to live.

“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery,

today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.”

(Bill Keene)