Author: Linda Hughes
5 Reasons You Should Attend Your 50th High School Reunion
I almost didn’t go. After all, until her death twelve years ago, my mom kept me up on all the hometown gossip about people I knew (and didn’t know). West Branch, Michigan, has about 2,000 people and my class at West Branch High School graduated 105 kids in 1966. I figured I’d kept in touch with a few of my closest friends, so what would be the point of traveling a thousand miles from my home in Braselton, Georgia, to see a bunch of old folks I hardly remember?
But after perusing classmates’ Facebook pages with fun old photos, I decided what the hell I’d go.
I had a blast, which brings me to my list of 5 reasons you, too, should attend your 50th – or 40th or 60th or whatever – high school reunion.
- There is a sense of community amongst classmates. I suppose most classes feel that way, but I was gobsmacked with the sense of camaraderie amongst my classmates. Once I got past the changed faces and physiques, and started remembering people by their voices, I felt like we’d never missed a beat. A number of them and I went from kindergarten to graduation together. There is even one man who was born the same day as me in our hometown hospital and we’ve always known that the nurses switched us, giving each of us to the wrong mother for our first breastfeeding. So he and I have been connected since day one of our lives.
Later on as I reflected upon this feeling of community, I realized that now that many of our parents have passed on, we have no one to share memories of our youth with other than each other. No one else on earth shares our schoolhouse experiences. We can recall the lavender scent of our kindergarten teacher, the jiggle of our third grade teacher’s fat arms, and the joy of shooting off our first rocket in eighth grade. Art class, dance day, playground, cursive, health and safety… Somehow as little kids we navigated the nuances of pending adulthood and survived together.
And when we were young we could never have anticipated the war to come in a land we had yet to ever hear of: Vietnam. Soon after graduation many boys were drafted and went to war. We reminisced about those who never returned. That kind of communal grief would be hard for anyone else to comprehend.
- People get better as they age. If you’d asked my 17-year-old self which of my male classmates would become handsome men, I would have been woefully wrong. What a delightful surprise.
And I thought all of the women were beautiful. Maybe it was just a matter of getting rid of our ‘60s hard hat hairdos, but they were stunning. Fun clothes. Glorious white hair. Pretty skin. Plump, slim, and in-between, they all looked great.
I anticipated as much when we were seniors. I gave the Baccalaureate dinner speech. I have no recollection as to why on earth I was chosen to give that speech – it certainly wasn’t because of good grades – but I do remember being reprimanded afterward. I had said that someday we would come back to our class reunion, curious to see if Rudy still had that wink and Jezebel still had that wiggle. Some of the grown-ups failed to see the humor in that. But I now know I was right. And I still think it’s funny.
- Old wounds really do heal. There was, of course, a lot of typical teenaged angst back in the day. But we couldn’t remember exactly what it was all about. There were jealousies over boyfriends and girlfriends, to be sure, and competitive rivalries over grades and sports, but all of that old animosity has fallen by the wayside in the throes of real life.
Even my neighborhood bully told me she now knows it was wrong of her to blackmail us other kids into paying her to stay out of our yards. Nice admission, although I noticed that she didn’t apologize. I got a kick out of the irony of that.
- Compassion dwells in the hearts of childhood friends. A couple of my classmates have obvious health problems. Rather than pity, however, I saw compassion from others. There was no “poor you,” just concern and caring.
There was also empathy for those who have lost loved ones, especially a child. As one man put it, many of us share the bond of having experienced “the worst day of our lives.”
I suspect by now we’ve all been through so many heartbreaks and disappointments that nothing surprises us. Rather than waste time feeling sorry for anyone else or for ourselves, we get down to the business of taking care of whatever befalls our friends, with as much love and compassion as possible.
- That graduation speech was right. I don’t actually remember the speaker or anything he said, seeing that I was pissed off during the whole ceremony. Because I’d been skipping school a lot anyway, I’d decided to skip graduation, too. But my mom grabbed me by the arm and made me go. Anyway, I’m sure that like most graduation speeches ours was about forging our way into the future with guts and glory. Well, wouldn’t you know, it does take a lot of guts and glory to be an adult. We rose above the milieu of life, matured for the most part, and muddled our way through.
I’m not naïve enough to think that everyone waxes fantastic about our graduating class. But still, we’re a group who is – for better and for worse – forever bonded together. If nothing else, that reunion was a good time with old friends, fun music, tasty food, and delightful beverages. Go to your reunion and let me know what it’s like for you. I’m curious to see if you enjoy it as much as I did. www.lindahughes.com
The Spark
I knew I liked Myra Lewis Williams 27 years ago when we went to lunch together for the first time. We were in a Mexican restaurant enjoying our meal when a cockroach crawled up the wall at her shoulder. Without breaking her stride Myra took off her shoe, smashed it, put her shoe back on, and went back to eating her enchilada.
I knew then that she was my kind of girl. We’ve been friends ever since.
We met when my husband started work for her husband’s real estate agency. She’d been doing a lot of public speaking and because I did, too, in my job as a seminar leader, we figured we’d have a lot in common. We do.
A year later Myra introduced me to Marka Palmer, who she’d met not long before at a conference. She liked Marka a lot, describing her as an all-Southern girl. Again, as soon as we met, it was apparent that the three of us would become best friends. Fast-forward many, many years and us “three amigos” are still so close that we tease that we have to remain friends forever because we all know too much about each other.
As a writer, for years I’d been saying to Myra, “You have to write another memoir! Women need to hear this story!” She’d tell Marka and me stories that made us laugh are butts off, cry like babies, and sit in sheer amazement. I knew her story of survival at the hands of an abusive husband, who she married at age 13, would be an inspiration to any woman who has ever endured abuse.
So last year when the time finally seemed right and she asked if I’d assist her in writing her memoir I was both thrilled and scared. After all, I’ve done a lot of writing and knew this was bound at times to be a grueling task. I didn’t want anything to mar our friendship.
Well, we survived and her book is amazing! The Spark that Survived is a testament to a woman’s ability to make it through life’s worst events. As Myra says, “It’s a book about how to survive life’s worst tragedies and your own dumbass decisions.”
I hope you’ll read this story and share it with others. Somewhere in your life is a woman who could benefit from this story. Maybe even you.
A Rose is a Rose
With the two new biographies just out about Rosemary Kennedy, I decided it’s time to share a story about my experience working for her sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver. Yes, they were sisters in the Kennedy family, thus sisters to JFK, Robert, and Ted. It was 1974 when I volunteered to work at the Special Olympics, which was a new organization with a big event being held on my college campus, Central Michigan University.
Mrs. Shriver (I never dared call her Eunice) had founded the Special Olympics out of love for her sister Rosemary. As those of us who worked the three-day event on the track field all knew, Rosemary was what was then called retarded, today called mentally impaired. What we didn’t know at that time and what I learned in subsequent years was that Rosemary’s disability was due to her father having had her lobotomized. It’s a brutal tale for which you’ll have to read the biographies to get details.
But working with Mrs. Shriver was something else. I was a small-town girl in a small-town college with a small-time job. The first time I laid eyes on Mrs. Shriver it was obvious that the silk dress and pearls she wore were more valuable than everything I owned on earth all put together, including my junker of $75 Volkswagen Beetle car. I thought her regal, beautiful, aristocratic… a combination I’d seldom witnessed in my little world. But one thing was clear: her love of the children who were participating in the games. I barely deigned approach her, but the athletes could go to her dirty and sweaty, and hug the heck out of that silk dress and Mrs. Shriver never flinched. They all received her affection.
I fell in love with her. I thought her the most marvelous woman I’d ever met. Today I see her as one of the most influential and important women of the twentieth century for bringing mental impairment out of the closet – literally in too many cases – and bringing human beings with all types of abilities together in a spirit of hope and fun and love.
As luck would have it, my job was to meet celebrities as they arrived and escort them to Mrs. Shriver. It was such fun meeting people I’d seen in the news, including TV and movie stars, athletes, and even Miss America. Out of everyone I met, however, two stood out for their interactions with the kids. Sally Struthers, who was a huge star due to the hit TV show All in the Family, showed up each morning before the kids came. She was there when they arrived and stayed until she’d given every last one of them a hug in the evening. Then she’d go out dancing ’til the wee hours of the morning. I couldn’t even begin to keep up with her. She was great. And singer Mac Davis sat under a tree all day long and taught the kids how to play music with spoons. They loved that. I think we stole every spoon out of the cafeteria in order to handle all the kids who wanted to play. They would go run their meet, then scurry right back to Mac to play more spoons.
There were some celebrities who came just for the photo ops. Once that camera flash popped they were gone.
On the second day Mrs. Shriver’s two children arrived in a limousine. I’m not sure I’d ever seen a limo before that event, so the thought of riding in such a big car was totally foreign to me. When I suggested to Mrs. Shriver’s personal assistant that her children needed some outdoor clothes instead of the proper prep school things they were wearing, he seemed shocked, then considered it. He went to his boss and she looked my way suspiciously. But her assistant eventually came to me with $200 cash and told me to go buy them something more appropriate. I’ll never forget the feel of that cash in my hand. At that time in my life, that was like giving me $2000 in pure gold.
Of course, I didn’t occur to me that they didn’t expect me to take the kids. After all, I’d spent years babysitting others’ children and taking care of my younger siblings, so I was used to being responsible for little ones. And I needed them to try on the clothes. I grabbed Maria, who was about twelve, and her younger brother, who was maybe eight, and we hopped into my $75 Beetle convertible with the broken top and bright plastic flower stickers covering the rips in the seats, and off we went to K-Mart. They loved my car! They’d never seen anything like it. It was the same with K-Mart. They ran up and down the aisles in wonder. It only took a few minutes to get shorts, tee-shirts, and tennis shoes, which they wore with glee. We were back at the track within twenty minutes. When I handed Mrs. Shriver $175 in change she was shocked. She said she hadn’t seen the limo leave and it was then that it became clear to me I didn’t know how things were done in the upper crust.
More and more over the years I’ve come to appreciate how she bravely spoke out about a topic many were embarrassed to acknowledge – the need for services for people with disabilities. I’ve come to understand that she did it out of love for her sister who, according to the recent biographies, she did not know the whereabouts of for many years. When she learned about Rosemary’s fate and that she was sequestered in an institution for the disabled, she visited her beloved sister on a regular basis. It was then that she put her family’s money, privilege, and power to good use to help others with disabilities.
As I said, Eunice Kennedy Shriver was one of the greatest women of the 20th century. We can only hope to have more like her in the 21st.
5 Reasons You Should Write Your Memoir
Everybody has a story. What’s yours?
You may think your story isn’t worth telling, but all of us have had disappointments, triumphs, and comedy throughout our lives. Somebody out there is likely to enjoy your tale and to get something out of it, if it’s told in an engaging way. That’s why Katherine Gray White and I have started Mudsill Memoirs writing workshops.
At our live events and in our online classes, we teach that there are five good reasons for penning
your story:
- Preserve your personal, family, and community history.
- Take in the breadth and scope of your life, recapturing lost dreams and desires.
- Honor your life-long traditions through timeless storytelling.
- Give yourself the gift of reflection.
- Have fun and more fun.
Sound good? Click here to learn more about our online writing workshop, Write Your Life Story.
Join us! We’d love to have you there.
Dog Days of Summer
![Happy_19_585975_20100501083158[1]](http://www.lindahughes.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/happy_19_585975_201005010831581.jpg)
In appreciation for the dog days of summer and our little furry friends who remind us to relax and savor them, my guest blogger is my sister, Karene Hughes. This is part of her chapter from our anthology of stories by 30 women, What We Talk About When We’re Over 60. Karene reminds us of the simple and yet most important pleasures our dogs offer us. Enjoy. ~ Linda
By Karene Hughes
I’ve never thought of myself as a patient person. I did, after all, inherit that embarrassing family temper. Remember the dad in the movie Christmas Story, down in the basement having the “conversation” with the furnace? Yup, that was my dad. My mom used to have her own conversations with the sewing machine and I was well into adulthood before I knew sewing didn’t involve #$%X@# words. My sister once told me of the time she was putting up curtains in her bedroom, conversing with them as well, when her husband came into the room, calmly looked at her and asked “Do you need a pill or something?” And me? Well, I’m the one who has a little conversation of my own with the MicroSoft gods who have pre-determined that I can’t possibly know what I really want so they auto correct for me. Don’t even get me started on cable and all those remotes.
So, imagine my amazement in learning that I do indeed have a very patient side. All it took to discover it was 14 pounds of spunk and tenacity named Chelsie.
Although I grew up with a variety of dogs in our family, I had never adopted one as an adult. Living alone it’s quite a commitment, always having to adjust your schedule around them. So when my sister-in-law Val suggested I adopt her sister’s 11 year old Westie Chelsie, I hemmed and hawed. Val and my brother Tom had two dogs of their own, which I often dog sat for, and they knew I loved dogs. Val’s sister had remarried, had several children and had started a day care in her home, so Chelsie, being an older dog, was having trouble adjusting to all those children and their commotion. I knew Chelsie from our family get-togethers and yes, I finally adopted her, but only on a trial basis. I wasn’t at all sure how this would go. Well of course, I absolutely fell in love with her in no time at all. Loving and loyal, she was such a curious and happy dog that she was a delight. I went from worrying about adopting her to worrying about the family wanting her back or her wanting to be with them and not me. As it turned out, she was always very happy to visit them, but right by my side when I headed for home. It was a perfect match for all of us.
If you know anything about terriers, you know they come with a surplus of personality. While they may be stubborn, that stubbornness can also represent a tenacity that I came to deeply respect and admire. Little dogs don’t see themselves as little. They’re ready to take on the world. Chelsie was such a character, she always made me laugh and I never grew tired of watching her watch the world. She was very territorial. In fact, she would leap off the couch and bark at any animal that appeared on TV. I was amazed she could even recognize them, but she could. Even a horse in the background would warrant a bark. It was actually quite fascinating. One day, though, I was sure she had it wrong. A commercial came on with a man fishing from a boat. Chelsie planted herself in front of the screen, stomping her feet and barking ferociously. I laughed and told her “Sorry, Chelsie. There are no animals in this one!” Just then, the fisherman’s cell phone rang. He answered it and heard “meow meow meow” and the screen changed to a cat on a cell phone calling him. OK, either Chelsie was way too smart or had been watching way too much TV!
Chelsie and I spent almost two years together and she became an important part of my life. I never tired of her adventures and grew to love simply watching her confident, adventuresome self while in the yard or on our walks. Often I watched her in awe. How on earth could so much attitude, affection, and just pure life be encompassed in that little 14 pound body.
When Chelsie neared 13, she developed kidney disease. Hospitalized for several days, I was so in fear of her dying. Once home, on meds and a new diet, she required subcutaneous saline injections several times a week to keep her hydrated, a necessity due to her disease. During this time, as I knew her health was declining, she became slower and slower on our walks and in our activities. While I always appreciated a good steady walk, I now slowed down, letting her set the pace. The truth was, I grew to admire and respect her tenacity and attitude. Here she was, having come so close to death and now in declining health, and yet she was still curious about the world around her and anxious to get out there and be a part of things. As she became slower, stopping more often to sniff (her way of resting), I came to appreciate this slower pace myself. I noticed this interesting tree with wildly twisting branches that I’d never really noticed before. I’d stand and watch birds building a nest or see the first little crocuses making their way up through the snow. All things we’d simply marched by before. I came to appreciate this gift Chelsie was giving me.
Chelsie started to lose her interest in eating. Each meal, I sat on the floor next to her, putting morsels of food in my palm, offering them to her and encouraging her to eat. Meal time now had to be planned for and could span a half hour. Instead of just letting her run about the yard on her own, I’d stay close, keeping an eye on her in case she needed me. My whole world slowed down along with hers and more and more, I found this to be a blessing of its own. I enjoyed simple moments in a way I hadn’t in quite some time. I quit rushing so and became more patient with life itself.
When I realized Chelsea was failing and there was no more the vet or I could do, I took the day off work and spent it with her. It was a beautiful, sunny day in June. I got a blanket and we laid in the sun. I stroked her, sang to her, napped with her and even sketched a picture of her. When my brother and sister-in-law got home from work, we all went together to the vet’s. It’s hard to explain, but I know that Chelsea knew and that she really was ready. The vet put her to sleep with us all stroking and talking to her. She went very, very peacefully.
I learned a lot from Chelsie. I had worried so about it being too much of a commitment (OK, a bother) to have a dog on my own, yet quickly found that the companionship, joy and unconditional love she offered was so much more fulfilling that I ever imagined. It truly amazed me to discover that patient side of me, as well. I’ve thought about that a lot since. Part of it is that our dogs are truly so vulnerable and dependent on us. How could I be impatient with that? They have no hidden agendas, no ulterior motives. That’s the great thing about dogs. They live in the moment with absolute honestly. Somehow, that makes whatever they require from you so much easier to give. I learned a lot from Chelsie.
Oh yes, I eventually got a new dog, another rescue mutt. I knew I needed another little four legged friend to come along and teach me what I don’t even know I have yet to learn.
Confessions of an Old Belly Dancer
Check out Boomer Chick Universe Magazine for my latest article, and lots of other great info. It’s a terrific magazine
Here’s the beginning of the article:
When I was in my twenties in the 1970s, I signed up to take belly dancing classes, as was the craze in those days. Recently married and perpetually optimistic, I wanted to stay in shape when I got pregnant. I also knew it would be fun, especially with my friends in the class, too.
Little did I know that such an innocent decision would dramatically impact my life.
Here I am, forty years later, still reflecting upon the gifts of that experience, especially the spiritual connections that blossomed. The joi de vivre of the dance not only allowed my body freedom of movement, it opened my heart and soul, as well, allowing a rekindling of spiritual ties. It provided me with a sense of spectacularly ethereal belonging to this world and beyond, with loving ties to those who have walked – and danced – on this earth before me.
So why did I ever let it go? Why did I let something I grew to love float away on the tips of my belidi veil? Why did I let those spiritual connections, the closeness of those beyond, slip away? Likewise, have you ever felt an other-worldly bond; a tie to guardian spirits, angels, ancestors, or however you think of “them;” and do you still feel it? Or has it evaporated in the over-scheduled chaos of today’s typical daily life, like it did for me?
Continue to Boomer Chick Universe Magazine to read the complete article.