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REUNION: Back in time one more time
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Published: September 22, 2008
Was that what I really looked like in high school?
Unfortunately, it was, and I had to wear a picture of that unfashionable haircut, the Buddy Holly black-rimmed glasses and skinny necktie all evening when I returned to Cleveland, Ohio, for my high-school reunion last weekend.
The gathering of the high-school clan is an all-too-familiar rite of re-passage for those of us advancing in our decades. The only comfort, as we file into the country club or hotel ballroom, is that our gray hair and bulging paunches are echoed by our former classmates, also burdened by those unrecognizable yearbook photos that remind us of who we used to be.
This was my 40th high-school reunion, and probably the last one I'll attend (although I believe I said that after the 20th and 30th events, too). In fact, I don't remember attending the 30th one at all -- only a sharp-eyed classmate remembered me there, as well as the absence of my wife. When you show up and your wife doesn't, you have officially commenced the Marriage Speculation part of the reunion evening.
My wife didn't come this time, either, and seeing the bored-looking trailing spouses, dutifully shaking hands and nodding greetings to people they knew nothing about and cared about even less, I was sure she had made the right decision. This was a solo journey down memory lane; I had known these people for the last 55 years of my life or so, and I had to face them on my own.
After going to college in New England, living in California for more than 25 years, and now being relocated to the South, I haven't spent much time in Ohio in the past 40 years, especially since my parents passed on. My best friend from fourth grade is still one of my best friends (we survived both high school and Hebrew school together), and he was the first person I called about the reunion.
"Why do we have to go?" he plaintively asked when I called to see if he had received the inevitable nostalgic reunion brochure, filled with pictures of cheerleaders, football players and no one who looked like us back in 1968. "Haven't you got this out of your system yet?"
Apparently not. We are a nation of reunions: high school, college, summer camp, church groups -- one of my classmates swore that she was ready to start organizing our elementary school reunion. The only reason I responded to that idea was that I was much cuter at age 6 than I was at 16, and the picture around my neck would look better.
Why do we enjoy wallowing in this nostalgia? Part of the secret agenda that motivates us is competitive, of course -- who's the most successful guy in the room? Who has kept their looks? Who's had the most marriages and divorces? Who is silly enough to bring their kids, as if we all don't feel old enough standing around together to begin with?
These questions propel most of the conversations at the tables, along with the constant refrain of, "I remember you! Do you remember me?" If you say no, you're a senile idiot. If you say yes, then you have to think of some salient fact or event about that individual. Sometimes it's easier to just seem out of it, and move on to the continuing search for that girl who stood me up at the ninth-grade prom.
I never found her, but I did sit down with my high-school sweetheart, now on her second marriage with a daughter in law school. She was still the pretty girl I remembered, and it was an emotional moment, but after a while, the silences between our comments became longer, and it was apparent just how much time really had gone by. The high-school reunion reminds us not just where we've come from, but how far we've traveled, too.
That's why these are always bittersweet events, the ones that remind us of the past while reinforcing the limits of our not-so-endless future. So when the invitation comes in another decade for the next reunion, the big 5-0, I can just imagine what my best friend Harold will say when I call to ask whether I should come up to Cleveland.
"Are you kidding? You want to do this again?"
And maybe by then I'll be ready to let the past finally go, and say, "Nope, I think I'm going to stay home with my wife."
■ Dale Pollock, a former dean at the School of Filmmaking at the UNC School of the Arts, now teaches film there.
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