20 years later

I wrote some weeks ago about how doubly surreal I expected my 20th high school reunion to be.  (Surreal, because I think that it's rare when 20th HS reunions are not so; and doubly surreal because most of my HS social life was spent with the class a year ahead, who wouldn't be there.)  And it was all that, but was also *good.*  I'm glad I went; we all seem to have grown up well, and that's really nice to see.

It was particularly interesting to go to my reunion the week after M. l'O's.  He went to a small prep school (his mother taught French there) located just outside Big City in Small State of Old Houses.  He was part of a really close-knit group of friends (they spent a week skiing together every January through college and perhaps a bit beyond), and so he's gone to every single reunion they've had.  (Prep schools, it is unsurprising to learn, do the show every five years, unlike Big Publics like the one I went to.  Fundraising, anyone?)  I've been to three of his reunions, now (10th, 15th, and 20th) -- so while I'm not catching up with old friends, I'm spending the evening talking with people I already know.  Some we see between-times, when we're back in Small State to visit his parents.  Until recently, they still lived just outside Big City, and several of his friends have settled nearby.

It's all cosy and familiar and known.  Reunion is less about journalism questions (who-what-where-when-why-and-how) and more about catching up.

My reunion was a big contrast.  This is the first we've had (as far as I know, and I might not know); it was a single evening rather than a whole weekend; and since roughly 1991 I've spoken to two people from my graduating class, neither of whom was going.  So I was going for precisely the journalistic reasons, although the questions I asked and answered over the course of the evening really boiled down just a few, because we omitted the trickier ones: where (are you); what (are you doing); who (are you partnered to, are you a parent to, and so forth).  The whys and the hows -- at least for me -- for the most part dropped by the wayside.

(At one point, describing the evening to my sister, who came up to City of Parks and Rivers while we were there, I compared it to speed dating: we/I whirled through conversations, touching base with many and getting into further details with very, very few.)

It felt both like enough and really, really strange.  But I had a couple of realizations over the course of the following days:

One of the things that happens (ideally) at reunions is that you pick up threads and habits of hanging-out time with people you used to hang out with.  But the habits I can/would pick up with my graduating class are tenuous and flimsy -- because, as I've said, for most of high school that *wasn't* the crowd I was eating lunch with, going to parties with, and so on.  It was never something that happened consciously -- about halfway through freshman year, I made a couple of friends in that class, and then fell into hanging out with a group that formed.  That lasted through sophomore and most of junior year, at which point 1) they were all going off to college, and 2) First Love and I broke up (and he was part of that group, and teenagers are immature, and . . . you get the picture).  Senior year I fell in with another group, but the social glue was never as solid.  We went off to college, and (frankly) after the first couple of summers I didn't go back to City of Parks and Rivers much -- when I did, it was to see family.  I didn't have a sense of having more than a single friend or two to reach out to.

In my brief chats with people at reunion, I felt a bit as though I'd vanished after high school -- and, well, I guess I did.  There's a way to tell the story as being about my decisions: I didn't go back to City of Parks and Rivers much; I didn't call people; and so on.  Email was new when I got to college: we all automatically had email accounts as freshmen, but Transitional Boyfriend (who went to a different school) didn't -- he got one, and then we had to have many, many talks with our respective ITS's in order to figure out how to write to people on different networks. 

I think that I've long felt a bit guilty, as though I should have tried harder to stay in touch -- as though, frankly, I should have been friends with the class of '89 rather than the class of '88 all along, and so on.  (It isn't as though there was a shortage of people in my own class who I liked; it just happened.)  Or, if not guilty, down on myself, for being so socially passive as a teenager (indeed, through college). 

Whatever.  My biggest realization, post-reunion, was perhaps unsurprisingly not about my relationship to the members of the class of '89 at all, but rather to the class of '88.  I can see that there were missed opportunities for me with the '89ers, but life is filled with missed opportunities, with roads not taken, and I'm at peace with that.  But I've also felt as though *I* should have been able to stay in touch post-high school with the class of '88.  It seems as though, by the time we were *all* dispersed and *all* in college, but many returning to the City of Parks and Rivers for vacations and summers, that I should have been able to reconnect with them, to salvage those friendships, to turn them into something other than friendships-by-proximity.

But that's wrong.  It wasn't all on me.  I've had intermittent contact with First Love throughout the years, and so have a kind of contented sense that I know how he's doing (very well) and that I could easily get back in touch with him if I were going to Grad School City, where he now lives.  And one other -- probably my closest friend from that group -- and I exchanged letters a bit in the few years after college.  And there are other distinct things that I could have done, but didn't -- and only realized were possibilities much later.  And the members of that class didn't call me when they got back into town from college, and I think that it was on them to call me at that time, rather than vice versa.  So it wasn't just on me: it wasn't my passivity, my (fairly lazy) habits about keeping in touch.  It was on all of us, a shared responsibility.

For a long time, that just seemed to me to mean that my friendships with the 88ers had been meaningless: they were *really* friends with one another, and I just got to tag along.  But instead, I can now see that this is about the fluidity of friendships in general.  And that's okay, because the fluidity moves and doubles back, too: it's really just a great and shifting dance. 

That's a good thing for me to realize, but it's basically just the bonus.  The really great thing about reunion was to get the answers to those journalistic questions, to get a sense of who people are and what they're doing, to see continuities between that and what I knew of them 20+ years ago.  We've all grown up. 

Comments

[dr]

I can't compute the possibility that it might be years, Shhh. That's just not allowed.

[Shhh]

And fluidity in friendships goes on, as we know, beyond our years in school, particularly in academia, as well all move from one place to the next. There are always some friends that you know you'll fall right back in with when you see them years later :-). (Let's hope it isn't YEARS before we see each other again!)