We鈥檝e had a few meetings planning for our upcoming 50th grad reunion and we would probably get more done if we stopped reminiscing and sharing stories from long ago.

But after all, that鈥檚 what reunions are about. Looking back and seeing where our journeys have taken us.

I was sitting in a lawn chair in the sun at the Cruise-in Swap Meet surrounded by old cars, old parts and old grey haired men.

I was joined by an old acquaintance and for some reason we started talking about our careers.

He was a prairie farm boy who wanted to join the RCMP and when he was accepted a recruiter came out to the farm and told him to report to Regina in the fall.

Later that summer he got a call saying they didn鈥檛 have enough to put a troop together so it would now be the spring.

Disappointed, he decided to bulk up a bit and joined a framing crew building houses.

He found that when he was dropping his tool belt in the trunk at the end of the day he was feeling a sense of accomplishment looking at what they had done. He bought a piece of land, built his own house, sold that and moved on.

He never did go to Regina and here on this sunny fall day he was proud to say he had built homes all across western Canada and he was a happy man.

I was going to be a disc jockey. I wanted to be Wolfman Jack or Red Robinson I used to lie in the dark and listen to Jack Cullen with the Owl Prowl and I always enjoyed Bill Hughes with the Roving Mike from the bus depot.

BCIT had a broadcast communications course and I applied for it my senior year.

While I had enough credits to graduate I didn鈥檛 have Math 12. I decided I would take that at Grade 13 in the fall and take the BCIT course in the spring.

But, I got a job, I bought a car, I found a girl and by the time September came around, that Grade 13 application had gone missing from my dresser. I turned in a different direction.

When Denzel Washington won his Academy Award, he said he had always wanted to be an actor but his dad told him he had to do what he had to do before he could do what he wanted to do.

He remarked that all the people he had worked with, had become part of his characters on the screen.

Surrounded by old memories on a lawn chair on a fall day we are simply the sum of all the parts we have played and the people we have met along the way. John Lennon said, 鈥淟ife is what happens while we鈥檙e busy making other plans.鈥�

No matter where we thought we were going, today we are where the universe wants us to be.

At least that鈥檚 what McGregor says.