A reunion tour 30 years in the making...

It’s been said you cannot go home again. Yet it seems human nature to try regardless, if only to catch a glimpse of the person we once were or to find that piece of ourselves we lost somewhere along the way, oftentimes through no fault of our own.

For a large part of my adolescence, high school was “home” and so thoughts of going back, of going “home” weigh on me as I pass a combine parked along Waseca CR-3 on my way toward the city and a reunion of classmates. Accommodating farm implements is part and parcel of life now that home is the farm; the city of my birth, meanwhile, is just a place I visit less and less. Yet inside a suburban school building significant chapters of my personal history were written. I was interested to see if the pages read the same as I’d remembered.

At first opportunity, I broke away from the crowd to explore on my own the halls that I’d walked for four years; they appeared neither wider nor narrower than when I’d walked them in saddle shoes. The walls were brightly painted and the lockers, too, the latter in green. The lockers looked newer, which isn’t to say they were new. It had been thirty years, after all. I imagine the life of a locker doesn’t exceed fifteen. And the walls were adorned with sketches by student artists named Emily and Britney and Sydney and Raul. I passed a room full of computers and saw that the library was now a media center. And there was a boardroom where the teachers used to take their lunches. And all along the way, lights clicked on as if welcoming my silent exploration. At one point, I startled the custodian (Kellogg High, class of ’77) who told me my alma mater was a good employer. I was heartened to hear it as much as I was to learn that service to others and worship is as much a focus for students as getting good grades.

Yet my visit did not fill me with a sense of warmth the way one expects when one comes home. I was in a school, but not my school. My school was gone or, perhaps, it had simply changed. Or, perhaps, it was I who had changed. Or, likely, both the school, and I, (all of us really) had changed in ways great and small. Certainly, the priest who presided over our Mass, a classmate, had changed. He shared some of the details with us; the others we were left to interpret at the place where his history intersected ours. Had any of us come “home” this night?

It’s been said you cannot go home again. You could debate the truth in that statement until the cows come home. Here’s what I think. The answer depends upon how you define home.