Gerald C. Matics -- Author

Last night I attended a reunion of my eighth-grade class.  My 25th year reunion, to be exact.  The night belonged to the Our Lady of Charity Class of 1983.

I have to say I never really expected to see many of these people again, but I'm so glad I went because it was a really good time.  Out of 70-odd people in the class, we managed to contact all but about a dozen.  That's not bad when you figure about half of the class is women who got married and took new last names.  Most everyone was easy to recognize; it wasn't that they hadn't changed so much as that they had changed in predictable ways.  It was easy to look at the adult and see the fresh-minted teen inside.  (Of course, a few really haven't changed, or at least not all that much, and that was a little freaky.)

What interested me most was whether we would all adopt the same patterns of behavior towards each other that we had back then.  What I mean is this:  You grow up in any group, be it family or friends, and you act in certain ways, and you respond to the way others act and they respond to the way you act.  Some kids are cool and some aren't; some are outcasts and some aren't; some are the class brain, the class clown, the pretty girl, the stud football player, the troublemaker.  I always had a sense of the hierarchy of the class, and where I fit into the pecking order was, to be brutally honest about it, quite low down.  When we all got back together, would I remain there?  Would the cool kids have grown into cool adults who wouldn't give me a second glance?  It's like a sociology experiment, in a way -- how does the group behave?

I'm happy to say everyone behaved well from that standpoint.  Twenty-five years later, we'd all become cool.  Maybe it's because we have more in common now than the sports teams or cheerleading squads or the accidents of neighborhood.  Most of us are married.  Many of us have kids of our own.  We all have jobs and lives and histories.  I think that made us all, without exception, interesting.  And that's why it was such a good time.

I wrote an e-mail to the Class of '83 to thank the event organizers and express my thoughts. Hey, I'm a writer, it's what I do. Here's a short excerpt:

What do you think, too mushy?  Not mushy enough?  Too late now to take it back, and anyway I got some positive responses, so there.

So now I'm wondering if somewhere in all of this there's a story lurking....