Catching up on 50 years

This photo was taken of me and a few of my old schoolmates standing on the steps of Crofton House School's "Old Residence" building.  It's the only building left from when I attended the school from 1962 to 1964.  I was a boarder and lived in several rooms in this old mansion.   

On Friday I spent the day at the school seeing the new buildings and having lunch and touring our old haunts. There are no boarders there now; the school is firmly in the 21st century with state-of-the-art computer rooms, science labs and theatres for its over 800 students. But the girls still wear uniforms with a Gordon tartan skirt and a blue blazer just as we did then.  Here are some of the younger students at the morning assembly.

The main event for me was seeing and catching up with some of the old friends from boarding school that I hadn't seen for 50 years.  Life has dealt all of us many different hands and there wasn't nearly enough time to talk about it all.  What an intense time it was!

The funny thing was that for the most part, people seemed very much the same as they were fifty years ago. Their stories were unique but their personalities remained the same.  The girls that I liked to spend time with 50 years ago are the ones I still would choose as friends and the ones I found shallow and irritating were still that way.  Some of those that intimidated me then don't do so any more. But that's probably due to my increased self confidence from fifty more years of living.

Here's a photo taken at our evening get-together, where we wore name tags with photos from the 1964 yearbook.  Although we're 50 years older, from our perspective we look just the same as we did then.