It's a Reunion!

This week’s blog posting is a little early. Does that mean that you will get two in the course of this week? Quite possibly, but I won’t make any promises. It’s actually an odd thing for me to actually blog on Sunday, but I’ve been enjoying just a leisurely day of sleeping in, having a good breakfast, enjoying multiple cups of coffee, and spending some quality alone time with my son while the rest of the house slumbered. Now my son is also slumbering, I have enjoyed some leftover fried chicken, and the sound of the gently beating rain which seems to have dissipated some of the heat and feeding our newly seeded lawn. So Sunday turns out to be as good a day as any, especially in light of the fact that these leisure days will soon be far and few in between with the start of a new semester. Besides, I just had to blog about the events of yesterday.
Yesterday, I and a few select classmates celebrated our 20th year class reunion; it’s been twenty years since high school. As usual, I dragged my modern-day DBBF along as we have a pact to go to one another’s reunions (hers is always way more lively and maybe that’s because I can act up and have people wonder if I went to their school). Although only a small gathering of folks showed up, it was nonetheless a decent enough time; I ended up staying for three hours, which was about two hours longer than I thought I would after being told that only 14 people actually paid to come. Once there, I saw people that I literally had not seen in person since June 13, 1991—graduation day. Granted, there were three people I’d seen within the past five years, a few I’d seen at the ten-year, and most of whom I’d befriended on that great and wonderful world of Facebook.
I’ll admit that for the 10-year reunion, I was a bit trepidacious about attending. Prior to the first of our reunion, I associated high school with the worst time of my life. I somehow had managed to repress almost any good thing that had happened in high school. But the 10-year reunion gave me a chance to put any and all of my childhood trauma from high school behind as I realized that most of the people I graduated with were people I known since the age of five, and after you’ve known people for a period of 15+ years, they become some integral part of your subconscious dysfunctional family. So I looked forward to the 20-year, and with the advent of the social network, I just knew that there were going to be more folks at the 20 than at the 10, especially when a lot of people recently joined this year in what I assumed was anticipation of the day.
In true anticipation of the day, my DBBF and I had a drink before making our way inside, then hit the bar after we got there, and took a break to get a little more. There were some pleasant surprises. I found out that one of my classmates has been living in Bowie for about seven years, and I was totally oblivious to that fact. I found out that another found out he was a daddy after 16 years. I got to observe at least four sets of besties reunited from high school. I enjoyed some drinks with my besties past and present. I also found out I wasn’t the only one to fortify myself with alcohol beforehand.
The truth is the older I get, the more I realize that no one REALLY liked high school all THAT much. Probably one of the most shared sentiments among my classmates was, “I couldn’t stand most of the people in high school.” We all had our own particular hang-ups; the person you thought had an easy or great life thought the same thing about you. The true testament of how much people wanted to escape Lancaster and all of its claustrophobic charm is evidenced by how far most of the people moved away: although a few remained in the county, locations of some of my classmates include as close as Richmond, northern Virginian, Maryland like me, North Carolina, or as far away as New York, Georgia, Colorado, and California.
What I also realized was that the class of 1991 has a special penchant for cynicism and sarcasm. At first, I thought it was just me; then as I talked to my closer circles of friends, I thought it was just the old birds-of-a-feather-flock-together syndrome, but as I looked at more and more of my classmates, I realized that all of us had that bordering on snarky attitude. I can truly say that out of the 14 people that showed up, I could only associate two with being truly NICE and sincere. And that’s not to say that the rest of us are bad people, but we all have a toughened by the tides attitude.
But walking away from the reunion, hair so windblown that not one curl remained, I can say that I had a great time with those folks and that I look forward to our next one. Maybe we can plan ahead for a 30th reunion to be held at a place that isn’t necessarily Lancaster—a destination cruise perhaps.