Diana, Cathy, Joey, Sandra, me, Andy

What was on my mind 20 years ago? I thought about 2010, the movie, and space travel, getting through college, and getting a good job. Now that it is 2010, we don’t live in space or even travel in flying-cars (they’re working on it), but I graduated college, and got a good job. The year 2010 means it’s time for our 20 year class reunion. It’s time to reflect on what we’ve done and how we got here.

The world has change quite a bit in the past 20 years. Perhaps the biggest change is the Internet and how we interact with it. The Internet came into it’s own around 1994-5. We had a 5-year-old Internet when we celebrated our 10 year reunion, but we didn’t have much more than email to communicate to each other. Flash forward 5 or 6 more years and we saw the birth of social media; communicating in near real time over the Internet.

Now we use social media to connect to classmates. We have a Facebook group. It’s not perfect – not everyone in our class uses Facebook, let alone Twitter – but it’s quicker than email. People are people and finding them will always be a challenge – ask the census bureau.

What I do know is what I remember thinking about what will happen in 2010. I thought I’ll turn 39 in 2010, and that sounded old. When I graduated high school my first thought was that my 10 year reunion will be in 2000, and my second thought was that my 20 year reunion will be in 2010. I thought maybe I would be working on space nuclear power by 2010.

Things I didn’t know would happen include the death of both of my parents before 2010. I never thought I would be married let alone on my second marriage by 2010; or have 3 step kids. I didn’t know I would be living in Texas for 15 years in 2010.

It’s easy to say, “I wish I knew then what I know now,” but the truth is “life is like a box of chocolates,” you really don’t know what you’re going to end up with. I wish my mom and dad could have lived forever, but they’re in a better place now than where they were a few years ago. I wish I only married once – to avoid that pain – but I’m glad I met my second wife.

I’ve changed quite a bit in 25 years since the movie came out. In 1984 I turned 13 years old in 6th grade. I wasn’t thinking too much about the future. I was concentrating on making good grades in 6 classes per day in a new school. It wasn’t too long before I would start focusing on what I would do in college and beyond.

In high school I started thinking about space nuclear power, specifically space ships and nuclear powered rockets. It wasn’t until I went to college that I learned we had already made nuclear powered rockets, but we should not expect to use them any time soon. It’s 2010 – about 50 years after the first test of a nuclear rocket – and we still don’t have a nuclear rocket.