I spent the weekend in Natchitoches, Louisiana, at the 30-year reunion of my graduating class of the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts. It was great to reconnect with old friends, and to hear what people had done with their lives. I was struck by how much suffering so many people had carried and were carrying in their lives. I know everybody deals with this, but it seemed a bit more poignant with my group, because ours was a school for gifted and talented kids, and we had been pumped up back in the day by the message that we could conquer the world. Nope. The world always wins. Time and gravity cannot be conquered.

One of my dearest high school friends, I learned this weekend, had in recent years been promoted to a one-star general in the US military. But as a father, he was living through the suffering of a close family member, disabled in a freak accident. You never know.

Nevertheless, this past weekend was an occasion for many of us to reflect on the dearness of the gift we had been given 32 years ago, when we all showed up in Natchitoches as incoming high school juniors, the first class of what was then an experiment: a public boarding school for gifted and talented juniors and seniors. In conversation last night, a classmate who, like me, had come to the school from a small town, summed up the meaning of the gift for many of us. Today he is a successful doctor, but it turns out he has a beautiful singing voice.

“In my old high school, every time I would try to sing, people would be like, ‘Oh, you faggot,'” said the doctor, who is not, by the way, gay. “But when I got here, and opened my mouth to sing, people said, ‘Oh, you like to sing? That’s cool!'”

And that, right there, is why LSMSA means so much to us. It was where we found our tribe. It seemed in conversation that the social aspect of the school meant far more to many of my classmates than the academics did. That was certainly true for me. As I told a classmate last night (high school musician turned software engineer), being at the school taught me that there was hope, that there was a place in the world, and a group of people in the world, where you could be loved and accepted for who you were, and not be made to feel shame for loving books and ideas, and being eccentric.

The best part of the reunion was a couple of sessions sitting around a crowded hotel room with members of our old group, telling stories, laughing, eating chicken fingers, drinking wine. I knew that I loved these people, but it was good to think about how long we had all loved each other, and how we were just about each other’s oldest friends in the world. Even if we had not kept up closely with each other’s lives, it was remarkable how we could just pick up where we left off. There was something about living so closely together at that time in our young lives that forged an intense bond. We ended last night with a startlingly intense and emotionally vulnerable discussion, one that kind of takes me aback to think about today (that at age 47 and 48, we were so open with each other, I mean). But then again, of course we spoke that way to each other. The bond of love we share really is that strong. What an extraordinary thing.

“This school was the most important thing that happened in my life,” said one man to me last night. “It set the tone for everything that followed.” Yes, that’s true for me too. To be sure, finding faith, getting married, and becoming a father, and discovering my vocation as a writer, have all been more consequential than where I went to high school. But it’s not sentimental exaggeration to say that my two years at LSMSA were a predicate to all those good things. At this school, among these people (classmates and faculty both), with their love and support, I found my footing in the world, and the confidence to carry on. Everything else followed. For that I am unsayably grateful.