The resistance of memory… my 20 year HS reunion…

I enjoyed High School about as much as electroshock therapy, Sandra Lee’s cooking show, and anything in the genre known as chick lit; mildly put, I hated it.  It was the time in my life when all my insecurities, which were and are still many, were seemingly under the microscope, magnified tenfold for all to see.  I was a skinny, kind of introverted kid with bad skin, hair that was neither curly nor straight but frizzy, and a way with the ladies that could best be described as Anthony Michael Hall-ish.  In short, I was a disaster, and it didn’t help that I was also a poor athlete and kind of a brain.

Thus, when I received an invitation to my twenty year High School reunion, I laughed.  There was no way I was going to attend I thought; I didn’t like it back then, why do I want to go now. Besides, it is not like I have more than a handful of friends from High School with whom I still keep in touch.  I was pretty resolute that I would not be attending.  And then a funny thing happened…

Facebook.  Yes, the revolution in social media, which was something else I swore I wouldn’t do, happened to me.  All of the sudden I was reconnected with people from all eras (and errors) of my life, including a surprising number of people from High School.  I was now “friends” with people I wasn’t even “friends” with the first time around.  And now they “liked” me.  Some of them even “commented” to that effect.  Girls that wouldn’t even talk to me in High School were now palling around with me on the internet.  Guys I hadn’t seen in years were now chatting with me across the ether.  I was now immersed in a world that I hadn’t even thought about much for twenty or so years, and I had to admit I was a little curious.  I started taking an informal census on Facebook, seeing who was coming and who wasn’t.  My friends started goading me as well, trying to get me to attend.  This idea, once unthinkable, that I would attend my twentieth High School reunion moved from the realm of possible to probable, and then to inevitable.  I had to go.

And so I did.  On October 16, 2010, I found myself stuffed rather uncomfortably into a suit that fit me perfectly only a matter of two years ago, standing in a hotel lobby nervously trying to figure out where to go.  The Mrs., who should have been much more nervous than I was, walked cooly next to me as we made our way to the event.  We got to the registration table, which had the organization of an Italian Social Services Bureau, found our name-tags, and headed into the main room.

The air rushed out of me like a balloon at that point.  Not because I was disappointed, but because it was exactly as I expected it to be.  Seeing as I couldn’t navigate this night without my old friend gin, I quickly made my way to the bar and order a gin and tonic, and then surveyed the room.  I wasn’t looking at people as much as I was looking at evolution, who had evolved and who had not.  For me, a striking number of my classmates were frozen in the amber, the manifest destiny of the people they always were.  This thought made me uncomfortable and I quickly downed the first G & T only to bury another.  At this point I needed to find a friendly face and make some effort at what other people would deem as normal social interaction.  Years of working nights in hot kitchens speaking Spanish to ex-cons had deprived me somewhat of these skills.  I needed to get them back, and quickly.

As fortune would have it, someone approached me first and broke the ice.  Not a close friend, but a nice person nonetheless.  It took the edge off.  I soon began to slowly circle the room, a slow motion mako, gradually exchanging pleasantries with one person and then the next.  I recognized almost everyone without their nametags.  It wasn’t appearance, but personality that jogged my memory mostly.  I also realized I still had a quiet distain for a few people that I hadn’t seen in twenty years.  Petty.  Probably.  But they still rubbed me the wrong way twenty years later.  That is an impressive feat.

And the night went on, rather quickly, in the same manner.  The Mrs. was a trooper, probably making more friends over the course of the evening than I did in the four years I spent at said institution.  I talked to some people that I will probably never see again, and some that I would like to see again soon.  The irony, if you can call it that because it really wasn’t ironic, is that by the end of the night I was sitting at a small bar table with the group of friends that had convinced me to come in the first place.  We could have had our own reunion, and it would have been just as satisfying to me.

My curiosity satisfied, I think it is a safe bet to say I probably won’t attend my 25 year reunion. This is not because I am a curmudgeon (although I will be by then), but because I did what I needed to do already.  It was a good thing that I went back to a place that I had no particular fondness for, if only to see how far I had come.  It was also good to see the success of others who I genuinely liked and cared for, and make a few new old friends.  As for the rest of it, it just isn’t my style.  I am not someone who likes to work the room, show off my work, or try to relive my past glories.  I like to think I get better every day forward,and that my best work is yet to be done.  Still, for one night, it was good to put aside the resistance of memory, and travel fleetingly back to a place that no matter how much I deny it, formed much of who I am today.

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