40th HS Reunion

I shouldn’t care, but I do, and that bothers me.

My high school class (1970) is holding its 40th reunion during the summer of 2010. The organizing committee has done a nice job of creating a web page for the reunion and a Facebook group. The web page asked for an information update so they could create a mini-yearbook. Each decade we’ve gone through this reunion exercise there has always been a freeform space to write anything I want. I am always perplexed what to say. This year I wrote the following:

“Every time we have a reunion I struggle with what to write in this space. What could I possibly say here that doesn’t sound sanctimonious? I am happy with my life. That should be sufficient.”

Yeah, I am not entirely happy with that snippy comment. I didn’t want to write a biography and I didn’t want to brag about my life and my family. There just isn’t much you can say without sounding like a jerk, which is exactly what I accomplished anyway.

Before writing my remark I looked through the names of the 58 classmates who had joined the Facebook group. The truth is that I barely remember any of the names listed there. This is disturbing because I had what I thought were the closest and dearest friendships during high school. I thought we would never lose touch and would always be the best of friends. There were close bonds in the orchestra, the concert choir, the cross country team, the track team, the wrestling team, the church youth group, the church choir, and with my classmates in general. We were a team in athletic competitions, concerts, plays, and worship. These teenage relationships seemed so deep and so pure that I could not imagine the bonds ever being broken.

I did not realize at that time that everyone would move on to different colleges and different towns. I don’t think a single HS classmate stayed in town to go to college at Coe like I did. Over the first 10 years I only saw my best friends a couple of times intentionally, and other classmates a couple of times accidentally. Relationships go both ways; it is as much my fault as theirs that we drifted apart. No, drifted is not the right word. Sped apart is more like it. Not intentionally away from each other, but intentionally pursuing our separate interests; first an education, then a job, and then a family, and soon there wasn’t time or interest in maintaining the past. There was only time to pursue the future.

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In the interest of detente I deleted a paragraph here detailing a specific loss of contact and my subsequent disappointment.
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 On the few occasions when we have gotten together one of my friends delights in telling all within earshot all of the worst things I did as a teenager. It was pretty tame stuff for a teenager, but for some reason it is embarrassing as a mature adult to have someone else point out publicly that I was once a dumbass teenager. I have stories I could tell about this friend that are too dreadful to speak aloud. He is apparently comfortable that I will not besmirch his character in turn, and in this he is correct.  Turning the other cheek stinks.
 
So why would I go to my high school reunion and subject myself to this abuse? If it is to brag about myself and my family, that would make me a small, weak, and needy person. If it is to hear what became of my classmates, then wouldn’t this lead me to judge them based on their accomplishments, or to be judged myself? What does it matter what they, or I, did or did not do after high school? Who gets to determine what success is? It isn’t my measure of success they need to live up to. It is their measure of success that matters. Anyway, this isn’t a competition. If it is, it shouldn’t be.

Perhaps my greatest fear is the one I’d rather not speak of at all and have deleted from this piece multiple times. What if nobody cares whether I show up, and if I do show up, nobody cares that I did show up. Ouch. That would hurt. But honestly, why should anyone care? We are no longer participants in each other’s lives. We are only spectators of each other’s lives at this point. We have so little to do with each other that my presence or absence doesn’t matter all that much. Why would I worry about hurt feelings when we are separated by decades and distance, both before and after the reunion? It’s an interesting point I have been struggling with for weeks and have been unable to resolve.

I would like to say that I don’t care about this reunion or my former friends. I would like to say that, but it would not be true. I do care, but why? Perhaps it’s because we spent our formative years together. It wasn’t war. It wasn’t a “band of brothers” experience, but it was our own personal coming of age crucible. We survived teenage angst together. We survived high school together. We suffered through those years together as insufferable teenagers. We survived each other.

I guess the bottom line is that it doesn’t matter why I care about my classmates. It is what it is. There is no point in trying to make rational arguments about emotions. My Vulcan hero Mr. Spock (Star Trek) would say, “It is not logical.”

I hope my old friends have had wonderful lives, and I hope they are doing well, but I don’t think I will be going back to see them at the 40th reunion. I don’t want them to worry that I might be judging them, and I don’t want to be judged. I also don’t want to risk finding out that nobody cares whether I am there or not. Perhaps I will risk it at 50 years.