Today in the mail I received an invitation to my 30 year class reunion.  Yes, you read that right! I have been out of high school for THIRTY YEARS!!!  Holy crap! It is not possible that is has been 30 years since I was a senior in high school.  Seriously y’all it feels like it was yesterday.

As I read the invite I began to mentally make a list of all the things I would need to do in the next 60 days.  I am going to need to lose 30 pounds, have a tummy tuck, Botox to my crows feet around my eyes and my forehead and have my teeth whitened.  During that time I am going to need to research what the original color of my hair was and try to get back to that.  I am also going to need to grow my hair into a fabulous style to wow my classmates.  How many inches can your hair grow in sixty days?

Why is it that an innocent invite can send me into a  hissy fit because I bear no resemblance to the way I looked 30 years ago? It’s not like all of my classmates has been frozen in time since the Senior All Night party.  They have all aged as well.  Sure, some of them are on Facebook doing the whole “I run marathons” thing but for the most part Father Time hasn’t been any kinder to them than he has been to me.

I guess it’s really just about wanting to be young again.  I want to go back.  I want to be able to appreciate the body I had then and wear the shortest shorts and a string bikini while the string doesn’t have to choose a fat roll to reside in.  I want to go back and know that these are great years.  The years when anything was possible and the only thing stopping us from taking over the world was our midnight curfew.Take me back in time to 1983 and let someone slap me silly every time I whine about how fat I am.  Let me know that the love I have in high school wasn’t  the only love I would ever know and make me understand that the next thirty years are going to be exactly what I make of them. I want to go back and take every chance that comes my way and not worry one bit about what other people think.

If I get down to it it’s really not about the weight or the hair color, it’s about taking stock of how I have spent the last 30 years.  Have I laughed and loved enough? Have I made a difference in the lives I have touched? Did I let fear of being judged rob me of chances I should have taken? Did I lose out on friendships with classsmates because they weren’t part of the right crowd? Was my mother right all along and if I had stood up straighter in high school would I have looked ten pounds slimmer?  (Why is it when you reflect on your past it always comes down to whether or not you listened to your mother?)

I am going to look at this reunion as a jump start to the next thirty years.  I am going to take my wrinkled, gray haired, flabby self to  Seymour Indiana and hug tight those people that helped shape me into the person I am today. Most likely I will end up having a few to many glasses of wine and dancing to a John Cougar Mellencamp song with my heels kicked off and my hair a mess. Maybe things haven’t changed in thirty years after all.