I’m flipping through the pages of my high school yearbooks this morning. The years were 1970 to 1974, which feels about like 350 years ago in dog years. If you’re sharp at math, you realize that 2024 is time for our 50th year high school reunion.

This doesn’t seem possible.

It was just yesterday that we were all nervous about 8th Grade Graduation and heading off to high school in McDonough. We were worried about pimples in the middle of our foreheads and secretly still laughed at Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble.

1970-71 was the year we got our driver’s permits, and we could sense the fear in our parents’ look at the dinner table. A lot of us had been driving already for a couple years anyway. It was nothing for Dad to tell me to run over to Billy and Walker’s to pick up something and bring it home. It was maybe a half mile on a dirt road, but I got to drive.

But now, just because of a birthday, we were officially approved by the state to drive a vehicle on the highway. That pink piece of paper folded up in a wallet was like a magic elixir. We felt taller and smarter and more grown up. It was only a learner’s license, but it was one step closer to the real deal. One step closer to real freedom.

As I look at the faces in the yearbook, I am struck by how small and how fresh the faces are in each photo. Girls still wore dresses. Some of the guys wore ties. Lots of plaid shirts. Lace collars. Sheepish grins. Cocky attitudes because we were in high school.

The 70-71 school year was the year that county officials merged the black and white schools together. The old names and mascots were put away and we all became the Henry County Warhawks. We were the first freshman class to cross that bridge. We had our squabbles, but we made new friends. We didn’t handle every day perfectly, but we grew up as we grew together over the next four years.

I don’t know who chose the name of the 1971 yearbook. I’m guessing a faculty advisor wanted to make a statement that was hip and current. Kind of groovy with the kids. Cool man. Peace brother. Let’s all wear plaid bell-bottom pants that will embarrass the starch out of us fifty years from now.

You ready for it?

“Aquarius”

If you’re reading this and you’re too young to have any clue, look up the song title by the 5th Dimension on YouTube.

The implication was that the stars and planets all lined up for that 70-71 school year. It would be a year of “harmony and understanding”. We’d all act grown up as possible even though we were little more than acne covered teenagers. “No more falsehoods and derisions” the song said.

The cafeteria would break out in perfect harmony:

“Peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars
This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius”

That was a heavy responsibility to lay on a bunch of kids who weren’t good at math and who were afraid to ask a girl out on a date. A lot of us were worried about failing English Lit and Spanish classes. I can only speak for myself, but I’m not sure I was even capable of understanding the world’s problems, much less fixing them.

The yearbook says that there were 400 students in our freshman class. I scanned through the photographs of each face and came up with close to 375. That was a decent size group of 14 &15-year-olds.

By the time we got to our senior year, we were a class of 240. I started to wonder what happened to the other 135 kids. Where’d they go? What was their story? How did life turn out for them?

I imagine that the demands of life got in the way of finishing school for some of them. They had to get jobs to help their family out. A few became parents, which meant that school dropped to the bottom of the priority list. Some moved away. Some just dropped out of sight. A few met with death way too soon.

The truth is that I don’t know much about any of the kids I graduated with. Not since high school. It’s like we’re all stuck in these photographs from 1974. Oh, I get bits and pieces of news from a few. Social media fills in a lot of gaps. But I don’t really know their stories.

If you go back through the senior yearbook, each one of us listed some kind of ambition, some sort of life goal beside our picture. There we are. The hair is longer. The Afros are larger. The faces a little more set. Almost every eye saying “we’re ready to get outta here and tackle the world.”

We wanted to be successful business men and women. We wanted to be airline pilots. We wanted to be truck drivers and mechanics. We wanted to be accountants. School teachers. We wanted to join the Army.

We wanted to be specialized in the medical field. Chefs. Secretaries. Journalists. We wanted to work with children. To become computer specialists. We wanted signs on the wall that pointed to degrees in psychiatry and counseling.

The pages are filled with guys and gals who wanted to become electricians and beauticians. They wanted to be coaches and photographers. Some just wanted to graduate. A few wanted to get married. Most just wanted to have fun in life. At least one aspired to be “a high-class bum.”

So what happened? How much of it came to be? Where did all the children go?

I’ve got a pretty good idea that most of our ambitions and aspirations changed as life settled in upon us. Stuff happens, right? Plans change. Perspective changes. The things that we thought would make us happy and successful turn out to be not as important as we thought they would be.

I hear there’ll be something close to 150 people at the reunion coming up in a couple of weeks. I’m sure there will be a story there that I’ll have to write about later. Sadly, I also hear that there’s somewhere around 60 of us that have passed on from this world already and won’t be in attendance. Life moves on.

What I think I’ve discovered from a distance is this. As we have grown older, we have become much wiser. We define success in terms of family, especially with the grandkids. We define our happiness and joy in terms of faith and hope in the hereafter.

At a five-year or ten-year reunion, there’s a lot of bragging and sizing-up going on. At a 50th reunion, I imagine that there’ll be a lot of smart phones out with pics of the kiddos going around.

The dedication in the yearbook says that our class’s “ability to abolish ignorance and injustice” cannot be measured, “though we believe it will be great.”

That statement remains true.

And the class of 1974 does not disappoint.