29 – West Warwick Wizards ’70)

062

No theme this year—
no paper streamers or borrowed disco balls.
Just the quiet arrival of time,
and all of us,
on time.
More or less.

The name tags are helpful,
but unnecessary.
We know each other
in the way only a certain kind of past allows—
not the facts,
but the essence.
A smile still tilts the same.
A pause still says everything.

We orbit the same stories
with new grace—
less interested in impressing,
more intrigued by remembering.
Not every memory made it,
but the ones that did
have earned the right to be told again.

No one needs to prove a thing.
We’ve all built, lost, learned, changed—
not once,
but many times.
It turns out high school
was just the prologue
and not even the juiciest part.

This isn’t a ceremony,
and it’s not nostalgia.
It’s something better:
a rare moment of agreement
that what we shared still matters,
even if we all remember it
a little differently.

There is elegance in showing up.
There is wit in not pretending.
There is something quietly spectacular
about being in a room
with people who once knew
the earliest versions of you—
and decided to come back anyway.

Here’s to that.
To us.
To now.