Four decades later …

40 years ago this week, this.

40 freakin’ years. What kind of a cruel anniversary is this, when it really only feels like 10, maybe 15, just long enough to become who you are away from your high school and because of it.

40 years is the gray-flecked-haired stepchild of reunions. At 10 years, you’re still a kid just getting started. At 25 years, you think you’re old but what you wouldn’t give now to have the neck of a 43-year-old. Heck, even at 50 they call you golden and give you a parade. But 40? Who wants to celebrate that?

After the past 14 months, we should. 40 years ago tonight the Class of ’81 walked across the stage for the final time as students of Incarnate Word Academy, a lovely little all-girls’ school tucked away in a hamlet of north St. Louis County, run by an order of nuns from Texas whose mission was to educate empowered women. There were 96 or 97 of us, and we really didn’t quite grasp, I don’t think, what the world had in store for us. The Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word set the foundation; it was going to be up to us after that. At least they had given us punctuation. Oh Incarnate Word!, exclamation mark intended.

Oh Incarnate Word! is the first line of the school song, an exclamatory phrase that was prevalant throughout the four years that skirted the 1970s and into the 1980s, an era that started with bell bottoms, Jimmy Carter and disco and ended with the Preppy Handbook, Ronald Reagan and new wave music. It really was a weird time to come of age. Oh Incarnate Word! was spiritual and warm and fierce and flawed. But it’s where I learned that sisterhood is real, that you can match a lot with a navy blue jumper and that we were waaaaay ahead of our time with our Chuck Taylor sneakers.

Oh Incarnate Word! Where a Canadian English teacher taught you to read deeper, write longer and leave it all out on the page. Where the drama teacher told you the reason you didn’t make “Oklahoma” was because you couldn’t sing or dance, and instead of letting that break you, you just did something else. Where you heard “Be Not Afraid,” for the very first time at an all-school Mass and you knew immediately it’d be a song that would touch your soul again and again and again.

Oh Incarnate Word! Where a class of young women would go onto becoming doctors, lawyers, physical therapists, journalists, teachers, principals, PhDs, entrepreneurs, scientists, real estate moguls, wives and significant others, moms and step-moms, grandmothers and step-grandmothers, sisters and sisters-in-laws.

At some point this year, I hope we can get together and celebrate this night in 1981. Hit me up if anyone’s interested in planning a reunion for this fall. Until then, cheers to you lovely women who stood with me 40 years ago at the intersection of wonder and uncertainty, and went out into the world anyway, sent out with an exclamation mark. Oh Incarnate Word!