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.
