Monday Musings 246 – Twenty five years and counting

Monday Musings 246 – Twenty five years and counting

Reunions are common. Reuniting may not be.  When a reunion also turns out to be reuniting, it can be magical. The class which passed out from the school roughly 25 years back met again and as i would like to believe also reunited.

They passed out as gawky teenagers, with funny hairdo’s and colourful pigtails, an awkwardness that the teens of that age thought was normal. They met as matured adults with receding hairlines, bulging bellies and greying beards, although some of them defied signs of ageing, which evoked the predictable envious ooh’s and aah’s. The girls were ladies and boys tried to be gentlemen. The quality of leg pulling that ensued made all such pretences melt away in a minute. It did not take much for the children to come out from grown bodies! Pure magic! Thank God their own children were too young to notice the inanities of the jokes – but they would know when they will meet their friends after quarter of century and search for comfort in such inanities. There is magic in such authenticity and the soul feels light when it does not have to conform to an image. That luxury is available with only those who have seen you in running noses and bruised knees, and with those in whose company you have giggled endlessly when thrashed together by the same teacher for a mischief which someone else had committed.

Everyone took a different path and each journey was meaningful – perfect in most ways and imperfect in its own ways – and that is what made it meaningful perhaps. I received a whatsapp wisdom the next day which said “Everything that you fret about today will be meaningless in a year’s time’’. I wonder what we used to fret over 25 years ago and how meaningless it appears today. The only thing that mattered to each one of them was to meet, mingle and reunite. Each found his/her own way of mingling and reuniting and it was not difficult to see that they were happy. The warmth was palpable.

Memories can be fickle – they have a mind of their own. Sometimes they remain embedded in a dark abyss and then with the appropriate triggers and appropriate company they start gushing out in the open. They talked of what they remembered of each other and irrespective of what the nature of the memory, they gushed together. The mush lurked beneath the humour and leg pulling. They realise that the good and the bad is not in the act but in the intent. Since all that happened so long ago was pure, naughty but free of malice, that its recollection releases only an warm ache.

Each will follow his/her own destiny yet will be united in the most powerful way that perhaps even the strongest adult bond will not be able to compete with – that it had no objective. It is the bond that develops when you share a childhood, that precious thing that can only be remembered but never recreated. I just hope they do not take another 25 years to meet again.