"Umm...Who Are You Again?"

I attended my 30^th high school reunion tonight. It was fun and eye opening, and it confirmed ideas I had about myself and others. You learn something about life eventually after piling on the decades.

Two things I noticed happened at the reunion.

The first is that the old cliques/friendships form themselves up at various tables. Jesus, nothing changes. The cheerleaders had their table, the jocks theirs and the jumpers theirs. I was a jumper. We jumpers picked and chose out of each clique people we liked and at least grooved with. The same happened at the reunion, I milled about picking and choosing once again. There were some people I recognized off the bat and others I had to really search my memory for. Someone would tell me about some long forgotten story I was apart of and then the flood of recollections would come back and I'd say...”Damn....now I remember you!”

You can't help but notice the social climbers are still climbing at 48. To this day they're always trying to get into that number one spot still. I'm reminded of that old Simon & Garfunkle song, The Boxer, which tells how we change, but don't.

Now the years are rolling by me
They are rockin' evenly.
I am older than I once was
And younger than I'll be and that's not unusual.
No, it isn't strange.
After changes upon changes
We are more or less the same.
After changes we are more or less the same.
 

What I had to remind myself of was this. This is a reunion and a bit of a stage show at that too. People will put their best foot forward. Also, I have no clue as to the details of their lives and am only hearing what they allow others to hear and that can be colored too. On the other hand, others were pretty forthright in telling the story of their lives w/o the attendant efforts to make it seem wonderful.

I knew one guy, back in my senior year. He was accepted at a major school and had his life's career laid out before him. He came from a well to do family, had the luck of being born handsome and all the adulation that the adults could shower on him, whether it was deserved or not. A life of success and ease was guaranteed.

Tonight, we talked. He opined, without my prodding and with his tell-tale thousand yard stare, that he should have never have started that career he dreamt about so long ago. It was somewhat surprising to hear such candor from some guy I haven't talked to in thirty years. The dream career did not turn out to be the movie version where everything goes right and it's happily ever after. What it turned out to be was the wrong choice.

“Yeah, I pull down $190,000 a year...but I dislike it and I'm getting sloppy about the job. It won't be long before everyone else notices this too.” he added.

“Wow.” I quietly thought to myself.

I never attained that yearly income, nor the prestige of such a career people place a high value on. But there he was, wishing he hadn't.

I hate to say it, but some of the girls weren't the girls I knew when they were eight-teen. Ah, I can't let go of certain memories. One girl I was overly smitten with back then appeared tonight with her husband and I knew it was her in a nanosecond. Yep, that's Nicole. Nicole wouldn't have spit on me back then to put out a fire. But I thought she was the prettiest girl in school then. So, I watched her from about forty feet away and could tell she aged somewhat. I didn't know by how much till I made a beeline to her to spark a conversation.

“Oh my God RON!!! It's sooo cool to see you! Wow! You and I sat together in Brother Dreis's chemistry class!” On and on she went.

I had to remain dead silent. Here's what I was thinking when I got close enough to her.

“Oh-my-God. You got ugly! What happened? You were the cutest thing I ever saw! Jesus H. Christ! You're all dried up!!!”

When I got beyond the skin deep aspects of her and as more time passed, I found out that she had that same upbeat personality that made her attractive to me. The girl I had known was still in there.

The second thing is I saw at the reunion was this.

One of the reasons I go to these things, besides the fun, is I want to see if people have grown at all. After thirty years, you'd hope they would have. After thirty years of life occasionally getting you in it's teeth and swinging you around like a Raggedy Ann doll, it should teach you a few things and temper your ego. All the women I met there grew, but having kids, teaches you how to do it. You had to put the kids lives first, not yours. The men, it seemed, were the ones to watch.

Another guy I knew from then, and wasn't all that thrilled to know him, as I thought he was a ball-busting, stuck-up, smart-ass, spent about 45 minutes talking to me tonight. What surprised me was his benevolence. “How can this come out of a jerk?” I thought. Well, he grew up apparently.

In these reunions, you ask each other...”Where have you been, where did you end up..etc..etc..” He asked me a ton of questions and I started to sense this was sincere interest. It was an attempt to connect as people.

“Where had my life's arc taken me?” He knew me so long ago and was truly curious about this. Good, I thought. This is real. Whatever may have happened in his life sure enough made him more human. There were a few other revelations I had of this kind tonight with some others.

I was glad to find out some came around finally.

On my ride home, I couldn't help but compare my life with the others. Some I met had “made it to the top” and others I found out about were not doing that great or actually dead. Though, if you take a deeper perspective on each of us, none of us can fairly judge our lives against one another as each had it's different starting points, different pressures or Aces in the pocket and a thousand other “differents.”

It's a crime to oneself, and the others, to try to encompass lives in a superficial set of parameters to see who “won.” We may have been kids then with a kid's view of the world. But not now. A lot of the pretensions had fallen away, including mine.