Wednesday, May. 27, 2009

Reunion erases all time

I’ve said for years that the best fiends you’ll ever have are the ones you have when you’re a teenager.

At that time in your life, you’re so impressionable; you’re like a huge lump of clay just waiting to be sculpted.

The people you surround yourself with are the people who help shape you as a person. That’s why some of my friends from junior high and high school are still some of my best friends. more than 20 years later.

Oh, sure, there are friends who come along late in life who mean just as much, if not more, to you, but there’s something about going through your most awkward years with someone that forges lifelong bonds.

Although I still believe that to the absolute truth, I have to amend it just a bit. The first amendment to my friend constitution has to be for the friends from college.

I came to this realization recently when I made a trip back to old Westminster College for Alumni Weekend. last week.

It had been 15 years since I was back for an Alumni Weekend and I was way overdue. It had been far too long. Maybe that’s what helped me realize what my friends from college meant to me. It wasn’t just run-of-the-mill college friends either. My closest friends were also my fraternity brothers. I lived in the same house with many of them for more than three years.

That’s 24 hours a day for nine months. You learn a little bit about people and a lot about yourself living in a fraternity house. It’s not all “Animal House” and “Old School.”

Many of my good friends from college also went back. were back last weekend. The dedication of a new fraternity house brought back more Beta alums than usual. Alumni Weekend.

We caught up on each others’ lives on Friday night. We shared stories all day Saturday and into the early morning hours Sunday. It was one of he most enjoyable weekends I’ve had in quite a while, maybe since my high school reunion last fall.

It’s funny how the cobwebs shake free so quickly with good friends. It wasn’t 10 minutes into my first adult beverage at the Tap Room — or whatever it’s called these days — that I felt like I had just seen these guys the other day.

It’s the same feeling that I had last fall when I saw some of my oldest friends in the world at my high school reunion.

It was the same, but different. It had been 15 years, but it seemed like just a few weeks had passed. We were all older, but we still looked the same. Our lives had taken us all over the country, but it was as if we lived just down the hall. It’s weird how time can’t seem to erase such great relationships.

And that’s the true definition of a friend.

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