Daniel Woodward Elementary School is just across a field from the house I grew up in. Last Saturday, forty years after leaving Grade 7, I walked back in.
We were there for a reunion of the Grade 7 class of 1986. Walking the halls of your elementary school as an adult is a strange and wonderful thing. So much was unchanged. The same corridors. The same feel. A time machine.
We made our way to the gym, the Taylor Coliseum, and there it was: the plaque, still on the wall, just as it had been. The gym is named after Mr. Taylor, our Grade 7 teacher, and there is no one who deserves it more. And he was there last Saturday, as were two other teaching legends, Mr. Nakanishi and Mr. Whitehead, our Grade 5 and Grade 6 teachers.
I wrote about each of them years ago, about the teachers who shaped me at Woodward and about what Mr. Taylor meant to all of us. Seeing the three of them together, still clearly friends, still clearly delighting in each other’s company, was one of the great gifts of the day. What they had was real. We could tell it then, and we could see it plainly now.
People might raise an eyebrow at the idea of an elementary school reunion. I get it. High school reunions are the norm, the cultural touchstone. But elementary school deserves its moment too.
Woodward was not a large school, and most of us spent eight years there without changing schools or moving houses. We were in each other’s classes, in each other’s backyards, in each other’s lives, year after year. There were 38 kids in our Grade 7 class alone. Maybe the good old days were not always that good for teachers. But the community was real, and it held.
What was striking about a 40-year reunion, as opposed to a 10 or even 20-year one, is what people stop performing. At the early reunions, the unspoken question is often who got ahead, who made it, who is winning. By forty years, that game is over and no one seems to miss it. People have lived real lives. Nothing has been linear. People have loved and lost and built things and rebuilt themselves and found their way through. The conversations last Saturday had the ease that comes only when people have stopped pretending life is a straight line.
We grew up in a particular time and place, and last Saturday we remembered it together. The clichés about childhood in the 1980s are all true. We went to each other’s houses. We played outside until it was dark. We rode bikes, played road hockey, drank water from the hose. We had a student radio show, Bugle Radio on CISL 650. A few years earlier, our Woodward choir had sung for the Queen at the opening of BC Place. Shellmont Plaza near the school had everything we needed: Safeway, the bowling lanes, the video store, Shirley’s Bakery.
We were twelve and thirteen years old in 1986, the year of Expo 86 and Top Gun and the Hand of God. The stories people told were about each other’s parents, especially the moms, who were neighbourhood moms in the truest sense. Moms to all of us, not just their own kids.
That kind of community is not nothing. It leaves a mark.
There is a lot of conversation right now about what children are missing: independence, unstructured time, the freedom to just go. Last Saturday was a small reminder of what that freedom helped shape: people who know how to be with each other, who can walk into a room after forty years and pick up a conversation as though no time has passed at all.
That ease is the thing I keep coming back to. Face to face. No agenda. No performance. Just people who share something that cannot be replicated or transferred or downloaded. A shared past. A shared place. A shared teacher whose name is still on the gym wall.
This was not just a point in time. It was a reconnection.
Many of us will stay in touch. As you get older, you understand more clearly that your life is the people in it. Last Saturday was a good reminder of how many good people were there from the very beginning.
I found your piece on the Woodward Elementary reunion to be spot on, Chris, especially your depiction of the three colleagues-for-life who influenced you and many others so beneficially. Your comments on who and what over time, besides our families, turns out to mean the most in our lives also rang true. It does indeed always come back to the people around us, now more than ever.
Surprisingly, reunions have become a focus for me this summer. I graduated from Vancouver’s Magee Secondary in 1959, and a classmate, Bill Harvey, had the foresight to keep all of us connected ever since, including organising reunions. Although I wasn’t a “joiner” during high school, and haven’t lived in Vancouver since attending UBC and SFU decades ago, I went to the 20th, 50th, and 65th get-togethers of the Class of ‘59, and enjoyed and valued all of them because of the connections I made with classmates, including ones I barely knew in school. You are correct, Chris, that the posturing that was evident during high school vanishes over time, to be replaced by sincerity, friendship, a wealth of experience, and a touch of wisdom.
Bill has set up a luncheon this month in West Van for the Magee ’59 grads who can attend to celebrate us all turning 85 this year. Our numbers have dwindled to just under half of the original 212, and some live internationally, too far away to attend. Regardless, we have arrived at the “if not now, when?” stage of our lives, which gives this event unique importance.
My mother used to say, “As you age it becomes more difficult to make new friends, and impossible to make any more old ones.” She defined an “old friend” as someone who is familiar with your origins, would like to know about your present, and find out whatever happened to you in between. Mom would be pleased to know that getting people with whom we once shared common environments, peers, mentors, and experiences back into our lives at a reunion can actually be a way to acquire those elusive new “old friends.”
The presence of the three esteemed mentors at the Woodward reunion clearly added much to that experience. We’re hoping to achieve a similar effect at another event on Vancouver Island in August that will reunite high school grads from decades ago with many of their teachers. The 1975, 1976, and 1977 classes from Vanier Secondary in Courtenay, where I taught for three decades, will hold a joint “50-ish” year reunion. A former colleague and I learned of the plan from a 1976 grad and long-time neighbour in Courtenay who is an organiser of the event. We asked her if they planned to invite us teachers, because most of the surviving ones still live in the area. She and her committee loved the idea, so about twenty of Vanier’s mid-70s teachers will attend a “meet-and-greet” with their former students, and with each other, on August 1. Some of us colleagues have remained friends since we worked together, but what a treat it will be to reconnect with the other ones with whom we launched our careers fifty years ago.
It will be fascinating to learn more about the life and work trajectories that our former students are following. My question to many of them will be, “What did we teach you or model for you that turned out to be most useful in your life?”
The most challenging part for us teachers might be adjusting to seeing those teenagers we knew half a century ago as the grandparents, retirees, and Canada Pension recipients they have now become!
Brent, what a treat to see you engage on this one.
Your mother’s definition of an old friend is perfect: someone familiar with your origins, curious about your present, and interested in whatever happened in between. That is exactly right, and I wish I had found a way to put it that well in the post itself.
The Magee Class of 1959 gathering this month is something else. Turning 85 together, with Bill Harvey having held that community together for over six decades — the work of one person who simply decides to keep people connected is so often invisible until you step back and see what it actually produced.
And the Vanier reunion in August sounds genuinely special.
I know my dad would have loved this post, and he would have loved knowing you wrote back.
Hi Chris,
Here’s a followup on the Magee Class of ’59’s 85th birthday party, held on June 11 (see my prior comment in this thread).
Twenty-four of us attended, and the conversations flowed freely–sometimes about school days, but mainly about how most of us continue to thrive and enjoy life. We also heard about a few who are now ailing, including contact information for those who wanted to connect with them.
The headline for me personally is that three friends from school in the 50’s and I reconnected and plan to stay in touch electronically and get together in person when we can. We have all gained a few “new old friends.”
With the relevant yearbooks, current social media, and other electronic means it has never been easier to get the coordinates of former classmates and invite them to a reunion.
My experience is that people just want to tell their stories and hear those of others. The simpler the program of a reunion is, the less labour-intensive and more affordable it will be. A one-day duration keeps costs down, and is really all you need.
Tempus fugit! Carpe diem!
Thank you so much for this follow-up. Twenty-four people, flowing conversations, and three reconnected friendships that are going to continue forward. That is exactly what a reunion should be. I love the phrase ‘new old friends’ and I may have to borrow it. And your advice about keeping things simple is exactly right. The program is never the point. The stories are the point.