I'm back.
A patchwork quilt of irrigated fields above western North Dakota were beautiful and green as we floated above them in the late afternoon sunlight. Cattle wound themselves up through the ravines down to where the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers converged.
I had traveled back to one more ten year reunion with my classmates. At the first, everyone was busy trying to impress everyone else. At the second, many lives were falling apart. By the third, we were mostly beyond all that and just glad to see our classmates were still alive.
For the most part, the men had aged better than the women, except for the ones who knew how to get beer in high school. Many of them were still carrying all the beer they ever drank with them as baggage. The rock-star wanna be who was drugged out ten years ago now had close-cropped grey hair and was leading an Assembly of God youth group. The home-coming queen still looked good. The football players who hung around town and stayed in the oil fields and farms looked a little worn. The few friends who were on drugs back then looked like they had aged thirty years in the last ten.
I guess you get what you pay for... and you pay for what you get.
Reunions like that do make you think. Ten years fly by, lives come and go, children and grandchildren are born. It makes one wonder about time, significance, work, callings, and the hand-full of things that actually matter.
It also makes one want to turn the next ten years into the most prolific of ones life.
Finally, it gave me a goal.
I'd like to be more gracious.
Every day.
Rich
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