"Has It Really Been 30 Years"... or "You Look Great!" - Part II

Continued from yesterday – this is all about the Parkway East 9^th Grade 30^th Reunion.

Friday morning, about 10 of us gathered in the front office of Parkway Northeast Middle School to tour/explore the school. To see if our memories of where things were located were accurate, to see if it was as big as we remember.

It was… and it wasn’t.

Just to walk into the Great Hall where we ate lunch, or the Home Ec room (do schools really still teach Home Ec), or the band room, or the drama room, or the gym… brought back different memories for each of us. Some shared, some individual.

But how poignant it was to walk into the gym and see a Viking painted on the wall instead of an Eagle. Yet a few small traces of the past still remain. Some old red and gold flag football flags and some old sports letters for Parkway East Junior High were found in the gym lockup. Sandwiched between the purple and white wrestling mats in the relatively new small gym were some faded, cracked red and gold mats. And we all oohed and aahed… and wondered if we had flopped on that particular mat.

The building itself had a round circular section with classrooms on the outer edge. In the middle, the library was upstairs and the science department was downstairs.

When we went to school, the downstairs science area as well as some of the classroom areas such as Unified Studies, were large open areas, split only by partitions. Now, they are walled classrooms, most with no windows and only a door. Yet every single one of us had memories of trudging downstairs to go to science class.

We wandered upstairs to the library where I had spent lots of time, looking for and checking out books to read. The passing of time seems to have hit hard. There were far fewer books on the shelves than I remember, yet progress showed with the many computer stations available.

As we continued traversing the circle, we all marveled that while the classrooms themselves seemed smaller, the circle seemed so much larger.

After signing out of the visitors log, our final act was to take a picture in front of the school sign. Yet the sign wasn’t accurate – it didn’t reflect our reality, our memories. So we stood up one of the red and gold mats we’d been given and draped a coat over part of the sign so that you couldn’t see the “North.” It still said “Middle School” instead of “Junior High”, but at least it only said “Parkway East.” We are the Parkway East Junior High Eagles.

While I didn’t go to lunch that day at Culpeppers, I made sure to stop by the informal gathering at the Brick Tavern and Tap that night. I wasn’t sure how many classmates would be there. As it turned out, there were 6 of us. And I couldn’t have imagined a better group. It gave us the opportunity to really talk, catch up, and get to know each other. And I walked out of there, feeling as though I had just made 5 new/old friends.

The actual reunion event wasn’t until Saturday night. I’ll talk about that night in the next post.