Reunited

I was in beautiful Middlebury, Vermont this past weekend for my 5-year college reunion. It was quite a celebration although it poured rain the entire time.

This was my first post-school trip down memory lane...I missed my 5 year high school reunion. It sounds kind of lame, but it really makes you take stock of your life when you get the 2-minute version of a hundred other people's lives in the span of 2 days.

Part of the benefit of going to a true liberal arts college is that you end up with a lot of people doing a lot of interesting things post-college...Middlebury really prides itself on being an "anti-trade" school. You therefore get fewer accountants, yes-men, and lackeys at huge firms. As a lackey at a large firm though, I suppose we're not immune.

A sampling of my closest friends includes doctors, lawyers, writers, construction managers, poets, pharmaceutical reps, museum curators, graduate students, musicians, finance wizards, talent agents, lab scientists, computer geeks, politicians, and many, many other strange and fun-to-hear-about jobs. A lot of my friends left their professions chosen out of college (many of them in the financial world) recently to follow aspirations they've always had but felt were impractical. I applaud that. Some of them (me included) have found different ways to include each other in their new careers. Good stuff.

The other notable thing that the weekend left me with is that there are lots of kinds of friends in life: those you lose touch with, those you weren't close to in the first place, those you stay in touch with and keep in your life forever, and those that you don't necessarily keep in close touch with, but don't need to in order to know that you'll always be tight.

It's the last kind that make me glad I made the trip, because not keeping in close touch with those people means you need to be reminded sometimes. It was great to see everyone last weekend.

More later this week.