VALERIE SCHULTZ: You can't go home, but reunions come close
| Monday, Nov 07 2011 10:42 AM
Last Updated Monday, Nov 07 2011 10:44 AM
My oldest daughter recently attended the 10-year reunion of her graduating class from Tehachapi High. My first thought was one of dismay: How can I possibly be old enough to have a 28-year-old daughter? Just the invitation made me feel ancient, but in a good way. My daughter is a successful, delightful adult, and the reunion was a happy reason to have her home from San Diego for a whole weekend.
Her peers from the class of 2001, now a group of 28-year-old husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, college graduates, productive workers, professionals, and reasonably responsible adults, planned to meet at the homecoming game at Tehachapi High. In a strange sort of homage to the past, I dropped her off at the football field to meet her friends.
We joked that in her early high school days, she did not want to be seen emerging from a car driven by either one of her parents. I admonished her, for old times' sake, not to go under the bleachers with any boys. We thought we were joking, but then, this grown-up, hard-working, confident, lovely woman turned to me with the eyes of a 16-year-old and said, "I'm kind of nervous!"
This surprised me, because only a few months before we'd been talking about the upcoming reunion, and she'd said that it was going to be different from reunions I might have attended due to Facebook. Thanks to their residence in the online world, my daughter and her friends and classmates mostly knew what each other now looked like, or what their partners looked liked, or what jobs they had, or how many adorable children.
They probably wouldn't need nametags to identify their former crushes and rivals. She seemed a bit blasé about even attending the reunion. But now, here it was, and it was as though her high school demons and doubts and angst had suddenly decided to accompany her home for the weekend. Or maybe they rose up out of old ghostly yearbooks.
She did, in fact, manage to have fun at the game and at the reunion dinner the next night, and reconnected with some of those odd souls who are not on Facebook. The classmate they'd voted the 'most changed' was a guy who had grown a fancy high-maintenance moustache, an indication that, in 10 years, most of them had not changed a whole lot. Like any reunion attendees, some had thickened, some had thinned, some had gained in height or receded in hairline, some had become wiser, or maybe less so. We mature, we age, we change, and yet we remain, in our deepest core, ourselves, the unique people God created us to be.
The only class reunion I've attended was a 10-year college reunion. I had three children at the time and was more concerned with their care while I was going out than I was with whom I might see.
Recollecting the evening actually fills me with lingering shame: I had no memory of the name or face of one classmate, and I told him so. His fallen face indicated that I'd make him feel like a fool. Later I figured out that we had actually spent a lot of time together during one semester -- he'd been dating a friend -- and I should have remembered him. I don't know why there are such blanks in my brain storage sometimes. When I think of that reunion, I feel bad that I went all the way to Dallas to hurt someone's feelings. Circumstances have prevented me from ever attending another.
I sometimes threaten to turn in friends whose names appear on the list of classmates whose whereabouts are unknown, who are officially missing from the mailing list for reunions.
I know where they are, but I'm bluffing: Their secret is safe with me. The local newspaper frequently puts out calls for alumni to get back in touch with the committee in time for a momentous reunion. Several years ago, my mother attended the 50th reunion of her high school class in New Jersey. It was a small, hardy group. I love to think of those senior citizens looking each other up and down, former cheerleaders and football stars and wallflowers and book nerds, and exclaiming, "I'd know you anywhere! You haven't changed a bit!"
In spite of Facebook, it seems that classmates will continue to gather, to compare notes on life, to relive past glories and pranks and innocence. The value of reunions, other than spending time with old friends and former acquaintances we might not otherwise encounter, is that a journey to the past sometimes makes us appreciate and even treasure our present walk along life's map.
"It's been a fun trip down memory lane, but I'm ready to get back to my real life," my daughter wrote on Facebook, once she was back in San Diego. If real life is built on the foundation of the past, a reunion reveals the bricks and mortar supporting our present abode. Lest we forget whence we've come.
These are the opinions of Valerie Schultz and not necessarily The Californian's.
