The high school
reunion

I went to a high school reunion Saturday, and I had a terrific time.

I had a great time because it was not my own.

The reunion was in a different town for a different school, and it was nowhere close to the year I graduated from high school.

I was there as the guest of a former faculty member who was old enough to be my father. We left when he got tired, and I was ready to go, too.

I had a wonderful time because there was no pressure. There was no pressure to remember all those people 20 years and 40 pounds ago. There was no pressure to make conversation with people I once sat by in social studies, ate lunch with in the cafeteria and sweated through p.e. class with but have not honestly thought about since Dale Murphy was still playing center field for the Atlanta Braves.

There was no pressure to pull up in the parking lot driving a fancy car with a some Hollywood actress hanging off my arm and three of the smartest and most adorable kids in tow at the reunion family picnic.

There was no agonizing for weeks about what to wear, who to hug or slap on the back and how to sum up more than half my life in two minutes of small talk with somebody who barely knew my name in high school but suddenly seems interested in me now.

I was the proverbial fly on the wall. I was invisible, and loving it, dismissed as probably a poor spouse dragged there by his wife. All I had to do is sit back and take it all in. I watched the same high school cliques eventually get together. I watched some people, who came alone, looking around to try to find someone to talk to and sit with. A few of them had hurt looks on their faces.
Remember me? Uh, yeah ....uh ...(squinting at the name tag) ... Hi, Gerald! ... So good to see you. I think of you often. ...

People bob in and out of our lives. We move through the years, replacing one set of friends with another. If you have remained close to your high school friends, consider yourself lucky. Most of us don’t.

That's why we struggle through these reunions. We dread them when they come around every 5 or 10 years. Sometimes, we don’t even go.

It’s much easier when it’s not you own.