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High School Reunion: The Good The Not-So-Bad and the Gorgeous
It happened right in my face: the sudden realization that attending high school might not have been the nightmarish experience that I always thought. Well, it was nightmarish in a kind of entertaining way, if you think about it.
Nightmares can be much more interesting than the regular plodding, mind-numbing boredom of everyday living.
Where are these thoughts originating? Well, they began last night, when I attended my high school reunion.
This wasn’t just any reunion. Don’t laugh—it was my 55th reunion. No joke.
Reunions are peculiar phenomena. Lots of people never attend them, for a variety of reasons.
1. Maybe school was awful and you assume the reunion will be, too.
2. Maybe you are ashamed of the fact that you’ve put on weight, lost hair, acquired skin blotches and eyeglasses and a cane. Just don’t want to be seen like this.
3. Maybe you assume that the same old clique of popular kids will lord it over everything and fail to look you in the eye in much the same way they acted in hallways between classes.
4. Maybe you fear that you will see small sadnesses everywhere—beauty queens become bloated, wallflowers blossom and turn lovely, sexy students look sad, brilliant classmates morph into dullards, bullies become milquetoasts.
5. Perhaps you think you’ll be judged by how your career has turned out.
So, was last night fraught with fear and loathing?
Nope.
It turned out to be quite fun and exciting.
In truth, all us geezerly post-high schoolers are at a point where pretension and social structure and charisma matter not at all. We are just a roomful of people who all look very much alike in advanced age. We seem to be in about the same social class now. We’re not on the make, we’re not trying to sell anything, we’re not busy trying to top each other, and all judgmental observations have been replaced by empathy.
Empathy—that’s what makes this special reunion so special. Empathy.
When young, you don’t realize consequences, your jokes are about subjects you know nothing about, your casual acts and remarks don’t bounce back on you.
Once you’ve lived a number of decades, you’ve gone through just about everything you swore would never happen to you. Mother-in-law jokes fall flat because you once had a lovely mother-in-law, depression and illness and accident and conflict are not as easy to dismiss, because you’ve been through them in one way or another.
In other words, superficiality has gone down the tubes.
At the reunion, I have a chance to chat openly with people who didn’t seem to be aware of my existence. I get to catch up on the lives of people who were once great pals and friends. I become the absorber of many great anecdotes and stories I’ve never heard before. I get to check out reality—did I really once publish a diagram of the social structure of the school cafeteria in our class newspaper, and get in trouble for doing so? Did this particular person know I once had a deep crush on her? Did this guy ever know I existed? And so on.
This magical leveling of class and structure is fascinating and actually enjoyable.
We are all geezers who have gained wisdom and experience…and we seem to be the only ones with whom we can share this wisdom and experience. Nobody else wants to listen.
Anyhow, I feel good about last night. Some measure of closure is occurring.
Now, the importance of each of these classmates in my life is clear. Whether they know it or not, their very presence in the dusty red clay halls of Tuscaloosa High School helped shape me, helped guide me in my exploration of the larger world outside. And I didn’t even know it at the time.
Does this resonate with you? It would be interesting to know where your life stands along this continuum—er, Timeline to you youngsters—and whether you, too, are beginning to acknowledge the great influence of others on your journey.
Last night was a hoot. Wish you could have been a fly on the wall
© Jim Reed 2014 A.D.