You know what I never did in school?
I never just stopped to really look around — at the classroom, the gym, the assemblies. I never paused to consider how early we all were in our journeys. It didn’t occur to me that life would soon hit each of my classmates in completely different ways.
Some would be like rocks, battered by relentless waves.
Others would glide through calm waters, their paths seemingly smooth and certain.
And some… some would be lost at sea — by choice, by chance, or by circumstance.
I wonder if teachers ever looked out at their classrooms and thought:
“In this room, there will be heartache. There will be joy. There will be love, loneliness, illness, resilience — and mistakes. Big ones.”
Did they ever glance across those rows of desks and imagine the lives we’d go on to live, the rocks in our backpacks each of us would one day carry?
I recently attended what, for me, was a fourth-grade reunion. St. Helen Elementary School in Saginaw, Michigan. A lifetime ago.
I remember things about these “kids” that don’t really matter anymore:
The girl who fainted in class when her blood sugar dropped.
The boy who was bullied.
My quiet crush.
Now, all these years later, I could see the miles on each of us — time etched into our faces, tucked into our stories, whether spoken or not. And this time, I did pause. I considered where we are now in our journeys.
And I looked ahead.
There is still so much more to come.
More joy.
More heartache.
And yes — more loneliness, more illness, more resilience.
Life is a song. It ends when it ends.
After all these years, we reconnected.
We laughed. We hugged.
We retraced the steps back to where our lines first intersected.
We’re older, weathered, changed. And I felt something deeper than nostalgia. I felt gratitude. Gratitude for the people here who raised me. Gratitude for the kids they once were, attending mass, walking down to the scary basement single-file in a tornado drill, and sharing their Twinkies.
Somehow, after all these years, there’s still a thread that connects us.
And as people of faith, we believe this won’t be our last reunion — and certainly not our most joyous.
That’s still to come.
But this one? This one was pretty special.
We even went back to the school where we met. It’s been closed for years now, windows smashed, playground gone. The old brick building awaits her fate.
For a few minutes, we stood on that familiar ground. Not as the kids we once were, but as older people — still becoming.
Changed by time.
And more to come.
