|
Peninsula Daily News Port Angeles, Washington Copyright 2000 Eric Rush www.ericrush.com |
|
|
|
The print on the name tags needs to be larger so we can read names at a distance and pretend we knew all along who we were greeting instead of having to squint at the names while we’re shaking hands. My high school class holds reunions in Boulder, Colo., every five years. In many ways, each one is more satisfying than the ones before. The earliest reunions were more like high school social functions. We hadn’t changed much from the kids we were into the adults we would become. By the time the 25th rolls around, juvenile social barriers have begun to erode and the jocks and the nerds, the beauty queens and the wallflowers, begin to communicate and appreciate undiscovered qualities in each other. When enough years have gone by that most are grandparents and many are retired, a class reunion becomes more like a family reunion. At each gathering, though, the lists of deceased classmates and of those who can’t be found grow longer. The occasional “deceased” after a name is disconcerting, even if it is someone hardly known and remembered. When each one of us dies, the rest of us are that much closer to our own ends. Many who can’t attend order the reunion book so they can catch on the lives of childhood friends. Sometimes the book reveals a former classmate living in the same small town at the other end of the country. Sometimes the notation “deceased” brings shock and mystery to the reader. Some lost souls live quietly under the noses of those charged with finding them. A few others call someone at the last minute to ask if we are having a reunion this year and are understandably miffed that, though they have lived at the same addresses through several previous reunions, they didn’t get the word on this one. At each reunion, a few who had never attended one show up. Others travel long distances to every one. As the years add up, differences in rates of aging become more apparent. Instead of appearing to be a group of people born in the same year, there are some that are still youthful and vigorous and others who have slowed down and become old. Some look much as they did when years younger, and some of those are beneficiaries of considerable medical and cosmetic skill. Others, some of whom are not afraid of growing old or not afraid of looking old, do look much older than their years. Some of us discussed briefly whether to have another reunion in five years or to wait ten for a 50th. I voted for five years. We’d lose track of too many people in ten years, even with email and the Internet, and, at our age, we’d lose too many others permanently. Occasionally someone suggests even more frequent reunions, but five years seems about right. If they were too frequent, they’d lose their appeal and fewer people would show up for any particular one. The whole point of reunions is to bring everyone together in one place at one time. It tends to be the same core group of people decade after decade that organizes reunions, books the restaurants, and puts in the hours of meetings and work required to pull off a successful gathering. It tends to be the same people who got things done in school. And there are always a few who point out a garbled address in the reunion book or a misspelled name tag and criticize the volunteers who assembled the book and printed the tags. The critics seldom volunteer to help with the next reunion, though. They are too busy with their own lives. Even family reunions are not always without friction.
|