Hometown Friendships and Memories

My recent visit "home" to check on my dad was paired with the annual memorial golf outing sponsored by my high school.  By "home" I mean my hometown - a small farming community approximately 3.25 hours southwest of the Chicago area.   I lived in my hometown from the age of 5 until I went to college.  Soon after graduation, I took a teaching position in a suburb of Chicago.  My hometown is a peaceful community filled with beautiful people.  A small town of less than 1000 people, some of the points of interest include Main Street, a café, town vet, mini-mart, post office, a huge park in the center of town with a pagoda, a veteran's memorial park, a few businesses, a couple of churches and a golf course.  But the main point of interest is it's people.  Although it could be very irritating at times (especially as a teenager) to have everyone in town "know your business," it was also very comforting to know that whenever you needed anything, there was an entire town willing and ready to help.  When my mother passed away on a Thursday evening around 11:30 P.M.,  the townspeople had already started dropping by my parents' home with food and comforting words early the next morning.  It was incredible.

Although I do get back to my hometown quite often these days to make sure my dad is getting along okay, I only get to catch up with my childhood friends a few times a year.  One of those times is during the annual Northwestern Memorial Golf Tournament.  The purpose of this golf outing is to remember classmates who have passed away and to raise money for the high school and less fortunate students who attend the school.   I play with other family members as a team each year and my family's business sponsors a hole in memory of my brother who lost his life at the age of 19.  Several of my high school classmates/friends play in this best ball tournament as well.  After the golf outing, we meet at the local pub for drinks, food, music, sometimes karaoke or a few games of Cornhole, but most importantly - great conversation, reminiscing and a whole lot of laughs!

Who says high school friendships don't last?  The friendships you make during your childhood are with people you have known for decades.  I attended the same school district for 13 years.  During a 13 year timespan, I accumulated an incredible amount of memories and experiences with the same people.  The ride from childhood to adulthood is taken with the friends you make during your school-age and high school years.  The busyness of a career and raising a family will most likely take you away from high school chums for years at a time, especially if you no longer live near your hometown.  But once you choose to revive those friendships after so many years, it doesn't take long to reconnect with those friends who were so much a part of your life for so many years.

We like to use the golf outing as a great excuse to get together each year.  One friend is from Georgia, two of us are from the Chicago area and a majority of the other classmates are local.  Our lives have taken us in many different directions - different career paths, different family experiences and different interests.  But at the end of the day, we were all raised with basically the same values and we love to reminisce and celebrate fond memories.

Part of the week long visit with my dad took me to Springfield, IL, also the state capital, to the Prairie  Heart Institute to see the cardiologist.  Of course we had to stop in Beardstown, IL to grab some watermelon, muskmelon and Calhoun peaches!  Dad loved stopping at all of the farm stands with me.  We enjoyed fresh treats of melon, peaches and cream, and fresh blackberries from my dad's farm.

As my friends and I sat around the table at the pub the other night speculating that some day in the near future we could possibly do a "Girls Vacay" - maybe a trip to an island or a cruise - I realized that it didn't matter where we reconnected.  It's not the hometown that brings us together.  It's all of the fond memories that hold us together.  It doesn't matter how much time has elapsed between visits.  Every time we see each other it's like it was just yesterday that we were walking the halls of Northwestern High School.