Fifty Years and Not Unscathed

It was surreal. Fifty years before in this very room, we had signed each other’s yearbooks. And here we were again, in the best possible venue for a half-century class reunion—our high school cafeteria with the same old floor tile and the same old windows tilted open to catch a breeze that still wasn’t there.

We were not unscathed. We had lost muscle and vision and memory and health. We had lost spouses through death and divorce and dementia. We had taken career hits, many when General Motors pulled more than 70,000 jobs out of Flint. And we had lost classmates through cancer and accidents and murder.

I hadn’t been one of the cool kids at Bendle High School, but at this reunion, they made me feel cool.

“You might remember me,” I told everyone when I introduced an icebreaker, “as the little Mennonite girl with long skirts and long hair and a covering on my head.”

As I expected, I saw recognition dawn. But what I hadn’t expected was all the warm hugs from all the cool kids.

We had nothing to prove in the cafeteria that day, no need to brag, nothing to show off. We were content to just sit with each other, to share memories and renew friendship.

Brian and Sue and I had a conversation. Now all retired, one of us had been a police captain, one a casino blackjack dealer, and one a teacher—all jobs with high risk for conflict.

“How did you de-escalate?” one of us asked.

The dealer spoke first: “I killed them with kindness.”

That’s it, I thought. That’s what we’ve learned in fifty years. That’s what I feel in this high school cafeteria on this day.

What mattered had changed. Dunking baskets and running 100 yards had shrunk to size. So had class standing and victories on the homecoming court.

What mattered now in this room was kindness.