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This past weekend, Saturday if you are stickler for details, I found myself sitting on the couch thinking.

Now, I don’t normally spend a whole lot of time thinking on said couch. The work week is over and so I make a conscious effort each time to avoid thinking. Thinking gets a person in trouble. Thinking keeps a person up at night.

Thinking is adult and I have conflicts with maturity.

Still, I began breaking my own rule. Riverland Community College’s graduation was the previous Friday and I knew that more graduations are  on the horizon. Naturally, as I pondered this annual exercise of wearing silly looking caps and gowns, I began thinking of my own graduation.

1992 was kind of a strange year. I was just one handsome, comely youth of 18 graduating with 12 others I had largely been with through the formative years leading up to my heartthrob final year at Chandler-Lake Wilson.

No, no. Don’t bother looking this up. As a well-established and oftentimes serious journalist, you can take my word that I was both handsome and a heartthrob. I would never lie to you.

….

At any rate we graduated in the spring of 1992 and then just a few days later my school was largely dispersed across Murray County thanks to the June 16, 1992 Chandler-Lake Wilson tornado.

I didn’t actually realize until I wrote this that it was being called this, but considering our towns were the only two dramatically affected by the only F5 twister in the country that year — we’re No. 1! We’re No. 1! — I suppose it makes sense.

It was something of an unfortunate and unwanted exclamation point on a year that would release this dashing, brown-haired, brown-eyed dreamboat out into the world.

Again, there is no need to verify this.

Dreamboat.

For a few years after the tornado there was some conflict between our grade — filled with just the best-looking seniors ever to graduate from a school — and the grade below us, who you know were okay, as to who actually was the last class to graduate from C-LW.

Our claim was based on the fact there was no more school for them to attend, but if I remember right, they claimed to technically be the last class to graduate as C-LW seniors.

They are, of course, wrong, but that’s okay. Somebody has to be. We can’t all be immensely cool and correct.

Our graduation was held within the confines of the elementary school gymnasium I had known all my life. Many weekends I would have the gym to myself as my mom would work on something adult related to her teaching job.

I knew every nook and cranny of a school I investigated up and down for the first six years of my life so perhaps it was somewhat apt that that is where our graduation was held. Not sure why it wasn’t in the high school now that I think about it, but who am I to question?

Again, if memory serves me right, I was plunked right in the front row, which considering the class size, was actually pretty likely. Not sure who was at my left, but Matthew Hurd was to my right and throughout the whole thing we made each other laugh like the hooligans we were.

It made up for the fact that graduation hit us both pretty hard during a rather memorable moment of the ceremony. It left us … um, stoic … let’s say.

The ceremony didn’t really last long before we went our separate ways where meals and receptions awaited and following that, the rest of our lives.

We each said the inevitable in each other’s yearbooks: “We’ll be friends forever.” “Stay cool,” so on and so forth, but it didn’t take long to realize that our divergent paths would spread us to the winds.

Some would stay closer to home, others would travel far afield and still others would grace Austin, Minnesota with his debonair ways.

No! Not Dan Ruiter. Sure he was first, but he was only with KAAL for a while where you’ve been stuck with me like a tick. Yeah, little known fun fact, me and Dan were friends for years before college took us in different directions.

I’m sure I’ll be thinking again of my time with the cap that wouldn’t stay on my head properly and the gown that has always seemed ridiculous as I cover area ceremonies. It’s only natural to spend time looking back

It’s been said plenty of times before, but it does make you appreciate where you are today and if it brings the ghost of a smile remembering where you started, then I would say it’s worth it.