Characters from Central Casting

I wondered if any of the stock characters from Central Casting would show up at my 50th high school reunion over the past weekend. You know, like some of the faculty or alumni we often meet in listening sessions who lament changes at the school. At an alumni lunch, I was chatting with Nora, a classmate, who still lived in town and whose own kids graduated from the school. I asked what it was like having one's children go to the same high school, and she said the magic words: “You know, it just isn’t the same school. It has lost its way.” When I asked what she saw as the school "losing its way," Nora pointed to the football team not being on the same side of the field at home games as back in our day.  

I was struck by the utter inevitability of this sort of response to change--however large or small--and the need for those in charge to be sympathetic while not overreacting. Of course it is not the same school, even though so little had changed about the school's physical plant that it seemed we had barely been gone for a summer. Perhaps a large part of why we sometimes react so strongly to even seemingly small changes in schools is that they symbolize the inevitable changes aging brings to us. Safer, psychologically, to complain about the school than confront the toll aging takes on our bodies. Maybe what one really means is not that the school has lost its way so much as that we fear losing the way ourselves.