Reunion Season Has Come Again

Last week, I read this post by a fellow blogger and it made me think.

Not about nostalgia, though. 

My high school years were turbulent. We were in the midst of the Vietnam War protests.  People just a handful of years older than my graduating class were, to paraphrase the saying, "turning on, tuning in, and dropping out."     One demonstration from a nearby college spilled over onto my high school campus, as I recall.

I am thinking about the past more and more.  Perhaps that's a function of being in your 70's, although I'm not sure about that.

Last year, I wrote a couple of posts about high school reunions. Briefly, my 50th high school reunion was cancelled due to COVID.  My high school ended up holding an "all years" reunion last year.  I originally signed up for it, but there ended up being a conflict with a family event, and I cancelled out.

This year, the alumni association announced another all years reunion.  The date? Doesn't work.  But I wasn't sad at all about it.

Somehow, I have lost the urge to attend.

This is part of what I wrote in 2023:

"When I think of the possibility of reincarnation, one of the things I dread going through once again is my teen years.  Or, well, the teen years of the person I come back as.

Maybe "dread" is the wrong word, but if I come back again and have to go through the teen years, I hope they will be....different.  In a good way.  

Growing up is hard to do.  I think it's getting harder and harder.  It's harder now than when my son was growing up.

True, I grew up in the 50's and 60's, which we sometimes look back at with nostalgia, but the surface truths of those years held deep, dark, nasty secrets.  And the Vietnam War overshadowed the happiness of some of those years.

Then, there are high school reunions, where we are asked to relive some of those years.

After rereading my post on my spouse's 40th high school reunion (the only reunion either one of us has ever attended) I found I'm not the only one who has stayed away from them.  One might say I hit a nerve.

Why do we get so nostalgic about high school?  Is it because of friends we have lost touch with, friends we hope to reconnect with?  Or because we want to return to a time when things were simpler and we were younger?  Except, things were never simpler back when, whatever back when is for you.

It certainly isn't simple now, though, in 2023.

I had signed up for my 50th high school reunion only because one of the two gatherings was going to be held at the high school I went to.  It wasn't a dinner dance, but rather was a daytime event, which was going to feature speakers, demonstrations, and tours of the school (it is still in the same building but things have changed).

There was only one problem - the reunion was scheduled to be held in June of 2020.  You can all guess what happened.  Nothing happened. If it ever happened, I never heard of a rescheduling.  I had other things to think about.

So I am trying again, this year, with an "all years" alumni day, again in June, celebrating my high school's 85th anniversary.  Scheduled during the morning and early afternoon, it will feature speakers, demonstrations, and tours of the school.  It will also feature opportunities to meet current students."

And then, like I mentioned at the beginning of my post, I cancelled out.

Something I have realized with age is that our class of 1970 was not the only high school graduation classes affected by history.   What about the class of 1930, graduating into a major economic depression?  The class of 1942, graduating into World War II?  How about the class of 2002, fresh from 9/11?  And, of course, there was the class of 2020.

Quoting again from my 2023 post:

"I keep in mind that these [the class of 2020] are the students of the pandemic years, the years of active shooters drills, the years of social media bullying.  They are the students who were rudely yanked from their almost spring 2020 routines and dumped into a new nightmare of remote learning, illness, and fear.   Then, they returned to school in the fall of 2021, to masks, illness (when Omicron swept through the school, which I heard about through Reddit) and more fear.

I lost a high school reunion in June of 2020.  They lost so much more.  They were too young to have the resources to cope that someone my age has.  

They persevered.   But at what cost?"

And now many of them are in the college graduating class of 2024. graduating in turmoil and possibly, even, experiencing another cancelled commencement.

Reunion season has come again.

None of us can imagine what will happen in the next 50 years.

For the classes of 2020 and 2024, I can only wonder what their 50th class reunions will be like.  I won't be around to see, unless there are some incredible advances in medicine, but I helped shape (in a small way) the world they are graduating into.

May they have a chance to have a 50th reunion.