Reunified, parts I and II

Friday night was Part I of the big Crosby–Ironton High School Class of 1985 25 Year Reunion . It occurred to me while this was being set up that a lot of people, myself included, tend to refer to these things incorrectly. “Yeah, our big 25th Reunion is coming up.” Well, it’s not our 25th Reunion; we haven’t even had 25 reunions since we graduated. It’s the 25 Year reunion.

And now, on to the festivities.

Friday night saw the first gathering at Coach’s Corner in Deerwood. It was a good time; about 24 people or so showed up for it, out of a class of about 89 people. There was a lot of catching up conversation to be done, which is strange, but I’ll get into why it was strange a little bit later. It was cool catching up with everybody. There was also musical entertainment; three people sat and harmonized on older tunes while taking turns playing a guitar. I’m betting some video was taken; if I find any, I’ll post links to it.

Most of whom attended Friday night’s gathering:

Saturday’s gathering at the The Bridge Tavern was more low-key than on Friday night. A rough count of about 11 people, plus spouses/significant others were there. I hadn’t planned to be there all night because I didn’t want to leave Bella alone for a long time during the storms, but they subsided, and I ended up staying until well after closing time.

Saturday night's gathering:

Ryan Hanson provided music in a choice of either karaoke or a solid wall of 1980s tunes.



At one point, a group of younger people all came in and began taking advantage of the karaoke for a while. It turned out that they were all celebrating an upcoming wedding for one of them. Once they found out we were having our reunion, some of them grabbed some of us and dragged us out onto the dance floor. I tried to politely decline, as is my nature, but I was told I had no choice, so I went.

It seems I was corralled by the bride-to-be herself:

I felt a little silly, but that’s just me. It was actually fun. Her name was Joni, and she’s getting married in August. I resisted the urge to ask her if her fiancé was Chachi, because she was probably too young to get the reference.

There was a lot of reminiscing about the old high school days at C-I. All of it was good; making more than one of us a bit nostalgic for the times. At one point, a discussion popped up where we compared ourselves back then to the kids of today. We never got in trouble the way they do now. We did occasionally get in trouble, but nowhere near on the scale of modern times. We did our underage drinking, and the occasional skipping out of school, but that was pretty much it. There were never huge fights; we never hurt anybody, and we never committed any crimes except for the underage part. I’m sure our parents at times thought we were horrible, but we really weren’t. We remembered being told that we would “regret” doing some of the things we did, and how we would wish that we could go back and do them over. And, we actually agreed with that sentiment. We would go back and do them over, because we had an absolute BLAST doing them the first time.

All in all, it was a good weekend. It was my first weekend out of the house and into the public since I can’t even remember. I need to do that more often, methinks. Even better, I still had Sunday to myself.

Hope to see everybody sometime soon again.

All photos courtesy of Terry Swanson.