A Class Reunion? Not on Your Life or Mine!

How can anyone not equate a high school or college reunion with a nightmare? Good grief, but wasn't being stuck in either location the first time around bad enough? You want to repeat the experience? Sheesh. Tell me you're kidding.

I've lost count of the number of reunion invitations I've received over the years, but so far, I have a perfect record....I haven't attended any of them. Frankly, I'd rather have root canal. Now, don't let my apparent attitude lead you down a dark path blindly. Don't assume that all this means my 'coming of age years' were traumatic or pain filled or abusive or any of those ugly things time, physiologists and news broadcasts have led us to expect. I actually had a pretty good 'growing up time.' As they would say in my youthful neighborhood, I had an easy row to hoe. (That always makes me laugh. Talk about square pegs and round holes, I was so misplaced.)

I grew up in a small community with more churches than stop lights, more bars than churches, and more farm animals than people. It was, and has remained, a lily white community, the old reputation for KKK activity and hangings still hovering in the aura of the town. It appalled me when I lived there and it appalls me now, but my maternal family roots went deep, and after witnessing his first cross burning and hanging, my grandfather's refusal to again wear a sheet apparently made everything all right. Since I was moved there as a child, I had no choice but to abide, but that didn't mean I never felt my displacement.

Although I was always active and involved, that doesn't mean I fit in. I was 'too' - too outspoken, too outrageous, too liberal, too tall, too intelligent, too aware. Just too much for any small minded area where the inhabitants had small expectations, limited experience, petty dreams, and nightmares about a larger world or different cultures that they did not understand. Now, again, this doesn't mean that some of those inhabitants weren't' lovable and loving. They were. Many were delightful, and a very few refused to condemn what they didn't understand first hand, and instead sought to increase their knowledge through books and lectures and interactions in the larger city to our south.

However, it remains that there was little commonality between me and my contemporaries. (I started to use the word 'peers' but it is such an absurd word...it has always been a word that actually says nothing, especially about the individual who is so blatantly different that they have no peers.) Why then, when I had no common ground except chronological years and momentary geography with a large bunch of people all those years ago, would I actively seek to share time with them again?

The absurdity of a class reunion is truly blatant when that class is from high school, but it is just as ridiculous when it's college. I was never reluctant about going to college; never reluctant at the idea of a college or university degree. It was, however, a real drudge finishing because my life kept evolving, the timing got 'iffy' and I physically moved in the middle of things. There was also that small element of a great many of the tenured instructors being total jerks and assholes who had little to teach and even less aptitude for it, but that's a rant on education and best left for another day.

Back to my main point. Last year my high school cronies held another reunion. I got the invitation; I got a few follow up phone calls; I got a letter suggesting someone would drive me there if I didn't want to drive myself (?), and I got additional prompts. I purposefully ignored it all. Then, my cousin died, and I went to the funeral home to pay my respects. The funeral home is in my old 'home' town. As usual, there were people there who knew me, but who I didn't recognize. Many of them talked to me as though we were bosom buddies and I had to ask other relatives who they were. It wasn't embarrassing so much as it was silly. After all those years that I lived away from that small town and went in myriad different directions from my 'peers' we might as well have been on different planets. Rather than being the outsider I'd always been, I was now a celebrity as well, although their interest was not in the different things I had done but in the mundane, everyday crappy normality of small town living that they had chosen and I hadn't.

One particular couple even dared to refer to how sad they were that I had not come to the reunion. They let me know they were equally said that they'd been unable to get in touch with me about it. (Now, really. I'm supposed to believe that crap? They couldn't 'find' me, even though my aunt lives right across the street from them? Am I supposed to be as terminally stupid as they are?) They then proceeded to give me the rundown on the entire reunion evening, who came, how they looked, what they were doing, what they said, how many kids they had....the whole, huge, boring, thing. And I told them nothing.

The big question is whether I should have been so polite. Should I have simply said in no uncertain terms that there were bigger highlights in my life that my high school years and memories? Should I have said we had even less in common now than we had then? Should I have said my growth had continued after graduation so that I'd left them behind in the dust? Should I have pointed out that they were as clueless and insensitive now as they were as teenagers? The only common reference point was that I was just as exasperated with their mentality now as I had been then.

No one is ever forced to live with blinders on their eyes. No one is ever forced to limit their views to their own back yard. We all have the same opportunity to look out and up, to pick up a book filled with the unique in the world, to actively seek things to do that are out of the mainstream. None of us are obligated to march in place with our eyes on the feet of the person in front of us who is also marching in place. Sometimes I think I should simply feel pity for these people who also had chances to expand themselves and their lives but didn't take them, but that's not my function or my place. My function is to look forward and keep going at the same time I admit to no understanding on their reluctance to crack the shell of their own existence.

In the scope of cosmic existence, I'm still an egg, but I don't think the world is through with me yet. I'm still a viable egg. I don't think that's true with my former class mates. That viable spark that was once inside them has slowly rotted from lack of desire and nutrition. Who in their right mind would bother to commiserate on the past with rotten eggs?