HOMECOMING

It is homecoming season across the land.  High schools are gearing up for the annual exercise of school spirit.  Faces are painted.  Color days are decreed.  Cheer leaders practice their flips and twirls.  Football teams practice trick plays to ensure victory.  Floats are constructed.  Kings and queens are selected.  Bonfires are alight and, across the Midwest, cider and donuts are doled out to returning graduates who still wear their varsity jackets and tell stories of past victories.

Homecoming is an interesting event.  Once it was a celebration of a returning college team that had been on the road across the Ivy League.  Fur coats, straw hats, pennants, are a game made up the event.  Now days, it is not so much about the returning team.  Two years ago, our homecoming game followed two home games.  Last year there was the story of a team that played their homecoming game away, because their field was under repair.

Homecoming is not so much about the return of the team, but the return of past graduates and it can be bittersweet.  Those who graduated last spring and have gone off to college return to their schools and are roundly ignored.  Those who, as seniors just last year, were honored just find that they have been replaced by a new group of seniors.  People nod "hello" and then go about fawning over this years seniors, this years football heroes, this years homecoming court.  Last year's graduates tend to gather together and slowly begin to walk away and go back to their new lives. 

Then there are returning graduates from years past.  They are the guys who once a year blow the dust off their varsity jackets and the women who can still wear their high school uniforms.  They come back with their children and walk the halls again and show junior where daddy made the three pointer at the buzzer to win the league championship basketball game. They stand with other classmates and talk about all the hi jinks they pulled, the tackles they made, the jocks they dated and the about of hair spray they used to get the big hair look for the dance.  For past graduates, homecoming is a time to remember a more simple time.  It was a time where the only worries where who to take to the dance, what color shoes went with the dress, and if a powder blue tuxedo was too tame.  It was a time when friends were made for life.  It was a time when a student could practice being an adult while still having the safety net of home.  It was a time when someone could dream of the future and make some plans.  It was a time when students from even small high schools could still feel the fame that comes with success on the field, gym, diamond and classroom.  Homecoming is a time for remembering a past that might be more fantasy than fact but that is okay.  Returning graduates can step back into the past, if even for a couple of days, and touch what it really means to "come home."

There are places in our lives that can be called "home."  It can be our childhood house, our parish church or our high school.  Home is a place where we can feel safe, even if it is only in the dreams of the past.  Home can be touched by actually going home.  It can also be touched through photos and videos.  Home can be touched by touching those friends who were a part of our lives then.

For those of us who live in the Midwest, homecoming also has the add extra of autumn with cool evenings, changing leaves and the smell of burning leaves.  What a great way to spend a weekend.  Rah!  Rah!  Rah!