My husband hadn’t seen his hometown since he’d walked across the stage at Eastern High School in Middletown, Ken. in 1968, but the invitation to attend his 50-year high school reunion aroused his curiosity.

Looking through his old high school yearbook brought back memories of high-school pranks, dances, football games and track meets.

A few months later, we found ourselves on an airplane headed to Louisville, curious as to who’d come to the reunion and how their lives had unfolded.

We had an afternoon to explore the Middletown and Louisville areas before the activities began, so we drove through neighborhoods and streets he remembered as a boy.

So much had changed – there were sprawling subdivisions where there were once acres of woods and familiar landmarks were gone, replaced with shopping centers.

He was thrilled to find the same barbershop in the old downtown section. The traditional barbershop sign had seen better days, but the inside had been preserved just as it was back in the 1950s, down to a bottle of witch hazel by the sink and a vinyl green barber’s chair near the window.

We went to the high school and lucked up when a gracious assistant principal volunteered to take us around. Each corridor brought back memories – the gym where my husband had taken so many pictures because he’d been on the yearbook staff, finding the walk through from the neighborhood to the school parking lot and the sadness at seeing the school track in poor condition.

Soon it was time for the first activity of the reunion weekend – a scavenger hunt. Betty Southard Stokes was the yearbook editor at Eastern High School and once again was coordinating the reunion.

People arrived and greeted each other with a “Hey, weren’t you…” and then smiles and hugs. We divided up into teams with instructions to take pictures at city landmarks.

As we drove around, Emily and David, who’d stayed in the area, filled my husband in about where friends had gone, who’d passed away, their current and past jobs and, of course, reminiscing about life at Eastern High.

That night, almost 50 people came to reunion dinner, and classmates were remembered with fond anecdotes. As people shared stories of high-school escapades, they also updated folks about the status of those who weren’t there.

There was the suicide of one of their most talented artists, and the room collectively grieved when thinking about their talented friend. The man sitting next to us was ribbed about falling asleep in math class.

Later, his wife told us that he had a severely handicapped sister, and he had to take care of the sister when mom was at work. Often, those duties went on into the night, so naturally he was tired during the day. We discovered many people had obstacles no one knew about at the time.

Some classmates had fulfilled their dreams, others were still working on them. Some had remained relatively unchanged – the funny one, the engineering guru, the gifted writer – and others had followed a totally different path after they’d left high school.

On that one night in Louisville, a room was filled with people who stepped back in time, laughed about the time a group of boys cut down a neighbor’s prized dogwood tree to use as a decoration for the senior prom and still debated who was responsible for stealing the neighboring city’s landmark anchor.

For most of us, high school is the place where our personalities begin to blossom into who we’ll become as adults. Reunions are a time to reconnect with those who helped us maneuver through those tough, turbulent years.

Classmates are the ones who remember when we agonized about our first love, the decision about who to take to the senior prom and the feeling of accomplishment when we walked across the stage at graduation.

Knowing there’s people out there who experienced what we did is reassuring. We didn’t imagine the past. We lived it and so did they.

You go, Eagles, Class of 1968. You did the world proud.

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.