Bumped into a high school friend for the first time in 30 years.

[Ms. Toad]

51. Very similar story.

One room county school (average census of 13, attended by my father and grandfather), although the district consolidated with the town school when I was in the 7th grade, so I went to a larger junior and senior high school.

I was "rebelling" by the time I was in late elementary school, and in both middle school and high school successfully challenged the dominant culture (once on excuses absences for pro -Vietnam war events but not for anti, the other for a similar bias favoring sports over more intellectual events).

I escaped to Oberlin college - a very welcome respite where I was in the dominant culture (a college that was right the size of the town I grew up in), then taught for 11 years on an essentially all Black high school with the same population.

Since then I've lived in communities around the size of the second largest city in the state I grew up in, and have traveled to at least 6; other countries - attempting to learn enough of the language so I could navigate on my own, and not be that ugly American who refuses to even show an interest in the language and customs of the place in visiting.

I keep in contact, via Facebook, with quite a few of my high school classmates and members of that community. Very few surprises as to where they ended up politically. I am still aligned with the few who either rejected the Vietnam war or the sports culture (i.e. rebelled early), and those who moved away or traveled extensively. There are one or two who surprise me - and I haven't figured out what happened there (moving to the left dramatically). I am grateful that we are all able to keep in touch, even though I now live 1000 miles away - and that, if anything, I have more interaction with them on at social-political issues than we had on high school.