The early school years amount to a pretty forgettable time for a lot of adults. For Kerry Trotter, those were her glory days. Well, glory days with braces. Today she extolls the virtues of her little Catholic school education, and the friendships born out of shared, uniformed experience.
I preened in the mirror one last time, fluffing my 34-year-old flattening hair to capture some of its early-90s hugeness. My husband stood and watched, flummoxed.
“So, wait, who again are you meeting tonight?”
“A bunch of folks from my Sacred Heart Class of 1992,” I said, squinting to gauge the severity of my crow’s feet. “Grade school.”
My husband shook his head in disbelief. “Grade school? I so cannot relate to that.”
His is the reaction of many with whom I’ve shared stories of my kinship with these classmates. I’ve found the norm is not to keep in touch with the majority, if any, from one’s elementary school era (Facebook reconnections notwithstanding). High school? Sure. College? Definitely. But a small K-8 Catholic school? Our abnormal closeness tends to confound outsiders.
The nineteen of us ‘92 grads, give or take a few, have not only kept in touch, we’ve grown as friends. We’ve been in each other’s weddings, attended our children’s birthday parties, shed tears at parent’s funerals. Even when we go months without speaking, the reunions effortlessly pick up where we left off, our goofy humor and good-natured ribbing a portal to our innocent, insouciant shared past.
Maybe it’s a Catholic school thing, maybe it’s a Sacred Heart thing, maybe it’s a Sacred Heart Class of 1992 thing. I don’t care what it is, I’m just glad it’s a thing...