“Class Reunions Revisited: Part One”
I have a high school reunion coming up in October, and I’m shocked at how eager I am to attend. It’s not as though I haven’t seen these people since graduation; I went to both the 10th and 20th gatherings. They decided to hold a 25th, but at the time I was too fragile, having just left my first husband a month earlier. Did they even hold a 30th? If so, someone left my name off the list, and I think I know who (just kidding–no I’m not). And now — it can’t be — but it is: the 40-year reunion of Lakewood High in Lakewood, Ohio, where I was born and grew up. I remember being surprised at all the people who flocked in from all over the country at those earlier reunions; now I’ll be one, having moved to Asheville in 2000.
The reunion committee sent me a list of events and a questionnaire. I’m sorry to report that I won’t be attending the Friday night informal get-together at a local bar, although I love the concept; it feels so surreal, like a David Lynch movie: An increasingly snockered and rowdy bunch of 58-year-old pre-retirees finally getting up the nerve to vent all that button-down, savage emotion that until now had been semi-successfully repressed. Spotty-faced, hormone-driven angst erupting intact from the the aging lips of somebody’s grandparent: “I always hated you, Susie!” ”You were so hot, Kenny, and I bet you didn’t even know it!” Spouses backing out of the place to get some air…
Okay, I admit, part of the reason I am not going to expose myself thus is that I could all too easily be one of those characters, verbalizing what I’ve only fantasized I’d say if I had the nerve. I already know how that turns out, thank you, having made what turned out to be the stupendously unwise choice of calling a high school boyfriend after my divorce–way too soon after my divorce. Do you know how these things go from personal experience? Well, perhaps your attempt at re-ignition went well. Mine, sad to say, went very, very badly. Not immediately, mind you, although there were signs early on, such as the fact that he went into a sort of hellfire and brimstone rant in the middle of the pizza parlor on our first, er, “date.” Should I have read my inability to get out of bed most of the next day from exhaustion as a clue?
No, I’ll save my one-night-only appearance for Saturday night — the actual reunion “dinner/dance.” I finally unearthed the origin of my desire to show up this time: two reasons, apparently. One — I can think of three people to whom I owe apologies. Suddenly, at this point in my life, such things carry weight. Thirty years ago, when another boyfriend asked at our 10th reunion, “Why did you take so-and-so to the dance during prom week instead of me?” I had nothing. Nothing but some flippant, dismissive excuse. They say what goes around comes around, and so I experienced real déjà vu when I found myself asking of the “brimstone” ex-boyfriend years later, “Why did you cheat on me senior year?” I received the same type of response I had given when asked at that 10th reunion.
I know now that even though we grow up and move on the old wounds don’t necessarily heal completely. And so I plan to revise my original answer this time, and apologize to two other classmates as well. It doesn’t even matter if they brush it off — it’s something I have to do so that I can feel a little lighter. Sometimes personal growth means we do what’s necessary to ease our conscience — and we do it more for ourselves than for anyone else. That’s not selfish, it’s part of bringing our life back into harmony. Calling back parts of our lesser-evolved self from whereever we let them stray, and forgiving them, because we now know they did the best they could at the time.
The second reason I’m attending this hoedown is curiosity. It strikes me as very telling that I went to those earlier reunions to see certain people, but largely to be seen. “How do I look now?” was my refrain, which I now understand stemmed from my low opinion of who Diane was. The questionnaire says, “What have you been doing with your life?” Tell me instead, “Where has life taken you?” and “Where have you gone that you didn’t expect to go?” These are the questions I would ask anyone who has lived for one half a century. and did ask, often, when I was a social worker specializing in gerontology. Every last one of us is on a unique journey, no matter how mundane it may look from the outside. It’s always a journey of the soul. And, as I have elsewhere quoted Pierre Tielhard de Chardin as saying, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
Come back for Part Two sometime in October, after the reunion. I can hardly wait to see what scenic routes some of those souls have traversed. I know this–it won’t be boring.