40 Years -- A Long, Long Time

With memories ready to explode like the cork from a celebratory bottle of champagne, the 1973 alumni of Spring Woods High School gathered for our 40th reunion, gushing and bubbling with excitement as we greeted old friends long absent and gathered new friends now known.

40 years. A long, long time.

The reunion, however, wasn’t long enough to absorb the details of each other’s lives, but it was another new beginning, a time to remember and reminisce and recall how lucky we were to have played together, danced together, laughed together, cheered together, and struggled together for that one brief flicker in our lives called high school.

And thank you, Lord, for name tags, which helped light up those memories grown dim during the past forty years crammed full with life.   

When my mother moved us to Spring Branch during the middle of my freshman year, I was a lost country girl in a suburban school twice the size of my small hometown. I cried every day, spent the weekends with childhood friends in Bellville, and once staged an abduction, tearing off the screen of my bedroom window and hiding in the closet, hoping that my mom would have compassion and let me move back home once I reappeared. It didn’t work. I think her words were, “Becky, come out of that closet right now and clean up this mess!”

But then…God sent me new friends.

Of course, I didn’t realize it was Him. But it was.

And at the reunion, I had a chance to reunite with many of those friends, girls like Ginia Keen who helped me vault the overwhelming hurdle of change and Sharon Burns who was more of a sister than a neighbor and Lisa Jordan whose love of God glowed even then and Kim Tomes whose can-do personality continues to rub off on those around her and Susan Mann who is still one of the most sincere people I’ve ever met and Mary Harrison who faithfully sat with me at lunch that first year and Sally Cobb who looks exactly the same as she did 40 years ago (how does she do that?) and many, many others, an endless list of answered prayers in beautiful faces.

I was scared and shy when I moved to Spring Woods, and I didn’t think I knew a lot of people, but that didn’t matter at our reunion. “For crying out loud, Ian,” I’d tell my husband who insisted on introducing himself as Becky Finch’s husband, “they don’t know who I am!” But I made new friends that way and if anything, Ian helped keep at bay, as he usually does, the lurking shyness that still hovers behind my rather raucous laugh.

And it was “so much fun.”

I think those last three words were the most commonly used ones of the weekend even though it was a time for three-work-phrases that began many conversations:  “I remember when” and “won’t miss another” and “glad I came” and “that is hysterical” and “how are you” and “I can’t hear” or “I can’t see” and “we’re so old” and “no, we’re not!”

And then “thanks so much” to three of our fellow classmates – Denver Griffith, Danny Myhaver, and Neal Carmichael – who provided the fabulous music and “it was awesome” to the dedicated reunion team of Rick Church, Sarah Granbery, Trish Glover, David Standefer, Danny Myhaver, Michael Geffert, Sandra McPherson Smith, Jill Martin Nixon, Jim Campbell, Greg Koch, Leah Hamlin Blackwell, Sandra Guillory Squires, Melanie Smith Engels, Rob Peters, Daphne Simmons Templin, Cathy Tims Hager, Mary Blann Cooper, Sherri Osborne, and Barbara Schuster Morrison.

And a special thanks, of course, to Mitchell Wu, whose genuine enjoyment of our class was obvious even to my husband, a Bellville boy who had asked me for months who Mitchell Wu was!

By the end of the night, my gregarious husband, who had scratched out “Ian Bader” and wrote “Billy Gilly, Micky’s Brother” on his name tag, was approached by a woman who asked him who he was because he seemed to know everyone. At that point, I decided the Bellville-Spring Woods transition had been a success after all, and then I ripped off his name tag and noticed that there were many others on the floor, too, not because they were fake famous people, but because we had stopped being labels and had started being friends who had discovered and rediscovered common interests and heartaches and loves and concerns and struggles behind the name tags we wore.

And we were all grateful to be alive. In fact, the only thing missing from the reunion were those missing from life, not mere names highlighted yellow on a spreadsheet, but fellow friends and classmates remembered and cherished in our hearts like Steve Westbrook, our Tiger mascot and SWHS scholar who later became a successful attorney and who would have loved every minute of the 40^th reunion.

We laughed at our past, remembering monkey-masked boys scrambling out of the ditch at Blue Light Cemetery and crawling into the cars and scaring us half to death. We retold stories, driving through the ditches off Gessner while being chased by Mr. Van who spotted that bright yellow Volkswagon taking us to lunch, the only time we skipped and the only time we got caught. Well, some of us anyway. We talked about teachers, recalling the moment when one of them jumped in the trash can, yelling, “If you treat me like trash, then I’ll be trash!” We remembered. And like everything else, the remembering was great fun, too.   

And we made new memories. Grown women wearing our pajamas, faces scrubbed free of makeup, chatting until 3:30 in the morning. It wasn’t a Tigerette pick-up party, that middle-of-the-night traditional pajama raid which ended at the Tomes’ house every year, but it was equally fun and didn’t hamper us from arriving at breakfast the next morning with our make-up back in place.    

I remember saying “cheesecake” instead of “cheapskate” and noticing that others also mixed up their words and I remember not being able to find my room key because I had left it in the door while I was running around with girl pals and I remember how much fun I had hanging out with Leslie Crow, (remember We Three?) and informing her that I was updating the name to “We Three plus Me” but not telling her that I don’t sing very well.                           

I remember Kim walking through the lobby with the dirty, rusty sewing machine I’d brought her propped on top of her suitcase, a gift once hidden in our old barn and now finding a new home with a lover of antique treasures. I remember the puzzled glances on the faces of those watching and how pointless it was to explain and how hysterically funny I thought that was.

And then all too quickly, a goodbye breakfast of more sparkling smiles and bubbling laughter as promises to stay in touch echoed throughout the Westin and the reunion festivities, so long in the making, fizzled to a final close.  

We graduated from Spring Woods High School 40 years ago.

A long, long time.

For many of us, this was our first reunion. For me, the Good Lord willing, it won’t be my last.

'73 Reunion Website: swhs1973.com