I went back to my thirty-year class reunion recently.
Within ten minutes, we were seventeen again.
Basketball stories. Football stories. Teachers. Parties. People doing completely ridiculous things.
Then, between the laughs, you learned what the last thirty years had actually been like.
Marriages. Divorces. Kids. Lost parents. Illness. Things people had carried that most of us never knew about.
Some people couldn’t make it back. Some aren’t here anymore.
Recently, I saw that it had been about a year since an old friend died. His younger brother had died a couple of years ago. One was a year ahead of me in school. The other was a year behind.
I keep thinking about their family.
My friend and I weren’t best friends. We were small-town close.
If you grew up in Maroa, you know what that means.
You knew somebody’s parents. Their siblings. Who they ran around with. What they were like at twelve. Your lives overlapped so much that you collected memories without even trying.
Most of my memories of him are still from when we were kids. But something I’ll always remember about him as an adult is how much he helped my parents.
Quietly. Without looking for credit.
He just helped. And I think people ought to know that about him.
At the reunion, his younger brother’s name kept coming up.
Three or four times, we found ourselves telling stories about him. He wasn’t even in our class.
Then somebody told one I’d never heard.
Apparently, during football practice, he picked a worm up off the ground and ate it.
Just ate the damn worm.
Everybody laughed. You could almost see him again.
That’s the part that stayed with me.
Thirty years after high school, at somebody else’s reunion, he was still making people laugh.
Nobody had planned a tribute. We were sitting around a table, and there he was—in a story.
We rarely know which moments people will keep.
Helping somebody’s parents. Something you said in seventh grade. A ridiculous decision at football practice.
Years later, somebody remembers. Somebody else says, “Oh my God. I forgot about that.” And suddenly everybody has another story.
There are people from Maroa going through hard things right now. Cancer. Illness. Loss.
Telling stories won’t fix those things.
But I keep thinking about how much I’d want to hear those memories if that were my brother. My dad. Somebody I loved.
Especially the ones I didn’t know.
That’s what I want Maroa Stories to capture.
I’m collecting fifty real memories for the next collection, and I need more than my own.
Tell me about your neighbor. A teacher. A coach. Somebody from the class ahead of you or behind you. The person everybody knew who would never have imagined being in a book.
You don’t need to be a writer.
Five sentences are enough. A paragraph is enough.
Give me the worm story.
Thirty years goes fast. You come back thinking you’re going to remember a school, a team, a place.
Then you sit down with everybody and realize:
The people were the town.
And you’re still carrying them around.
