Forget the 10 year!

Briefly, the holiday and my trip--it was all lovely, wonderful dinner with new friends David, Susan, Miriam, Rebecca, Asher, Patty, Earl, Alice, Jack, etc. Good visits with cousins Vince, Sue, and Steven. Good visits with old friend Kate, and old friend Austin plus meeting his wife Jenn and 5-mo.-old daughter Addison. Good good good. Quite lovely.

I'm skipping ahead because I can't get over this--last night I got a facebook message from my 3rd grade teacher. There is no way I can explain in one blog how amazing this woman and her class were, but (of course) I'll try. The 25 of us were hand picked by the previous principal before she retired. At least once a week, something reminds me of the 180 days I spent in class with her twenty years ago. She taught us the chorus to Don McLean's "American Pie" and I went home and played my dad's LP over and over until I had written down all the verses and I've known the words by heart ever since. She taught us a song about the Titanic which we used as the melody for our local history project later in the year, and which I still get stuck in my head about twice a year. She kept a snake in the classroom and each week one student was the Pet Feeder. Also each week, one student was singled out to sit in the front of the classroom with her while the rest of the class wrote nice letters to him or her. I still have my letters. They're tucked into my yearbook. She made such an impression that 9 years later, I sent her a high school graduation announcement.

So last night I get this message from her and I send a reply. Then I updated my facebook status and my friend Katie, who I'd known from elementary school, girl scouts, and church, comments that she had the same teacher and hadn't remembered that we'd been classmates that particular year. (It's hard to keep the early years straight when my most recent memory of her is dancing with my dad at her wedding.) So I dig up the yearbook this afternoon to confirm.

In the meantime, I received a reply email from the amazing teacher, and it throws me into a quest. I spent the last hour or so searching facebook with the names of each of my 3rd grade classmates. Three of them were already facebook friends, so myself included 4 of us were accounted for. I found 7 fairly easily on facebook, and one of them is helping me to find an 8th. There are 5 whose parents my parents still see periodically, so I may recruit them for some reconnaissance. That bring us to 17. Of the 25, there are only 8 still to find... Not that I know because I didn't make it to mine, but a 20-year 3rd Grade Reunion sounds much more interesting than a 10-year High School one.