Just got home a few hours ago from the first one I have been to, the 40th, and I’ll never attend one again. I looked forward to it, a chance to see friends I had then and remember the good times we had way back then. But in talking to them, I had nothing much to say . Every conversation went the same way -"Oh so glad to see you, remember that time when…where are you living now and what do yo do?.. " And we laughed about the fun times 40 years ago. And I wondered how the hell was I great friends with these guys growing up, nice guys but I can’t imagine becoming friends with them if I just met them now. There was only one time when politics came up, and that was when my old friend blamed the increase in homicides in NYC this year (where I used to live and my brothers still do) on the police being defunded. I wanted to say something but did not. I am fairly certain, this being southwest Virginia, that some of my friends from those days are still Trumpers
Got bored with that after about half an hour, hung aroud hoping to get a chance to talk to a couple of girls (mature women now of course) that I never had the never to ask for a date then just to show them that I was no longer the painfully shy boy who was afraid of girls. And I got that chance and I think I did OK, I made them laugh and for one in particular, the one who organized the ev ent, who told me on Facebook a few weeks before that she was in love with me in the 8th grade, I was at her table for half an hour and if we were living in an alternative universe and she didn’t live four hours away and wasn’t married, she might be here right now and I would not be writing this.
And she was not my dream girl. My dream girl, the class President and head cheerleader who lived down the block from me and who used to wave to me from her stoop whern I rode by her house on my bike but I never had the nerve to stop riding and talk to her, did not show for the reunion. I just wanted to say to her, "Hey, if I had asked you out, would you have said “Yes”
So I guess my whole story comes down to unrequited love for high school girls. That is a song titlle, maybe an album.
I went to 2 reunions - the first at 9 1/2 (yeah, weird) and the second was a combined class of '70, '71, '72, '73, and maybe a few more. Both had live bands - I guess they were our classmates who had garage bands - but they were so loud it was impossible to talk to anyone. And the people I was most interested in seeing again weren’t there.
Never again. I don’t know if anyone is planning a 50th this spring, but I’m busy that night.
Nah. No point. I went to the biggest high school in the system and everyone I liked from there I never lost touch with and I still see regularly. All those 2,000 other people were complete strangers back then and still would be now.
No. My 40th is next year if they have one. There were several hundred people in my class and I only knew a few dozen of them. I wasn’t particularly popular nor was I bullied; just a regular brainy kid. It wasn’t a happy time in my life but that didn’t have much to do with school. The whole idea seems horribly awkward and I don’t see the point. That’s just me though. I hope that those who do attend have a great time.
Tried the 20th, 2 day event. None of the brains showed up (I was nominally a member but not really in my iconoclastic outcast state). I thus didn’t bother w/ day 2, despite the presence of the head cheerleader from down my home street that I had a brief crush on in 7th grade (once in 11th she sat next to me in the auditorium and visibly squirmed in my presence, tho nothing came of it).
The 40th last year was canceled because of covid and weirdly apparently never rescheduled. No plans to go anyway, because this time everyone would make a big deal out of my youthful appearance, less than zero interest in that.
My 40th will be next year, but since I’ve never been to one, I don’t know if they’ll even bother finding me through my various moves to send me an invite.
I did go to one of my sister’s class reunions. The way that worked out was, she was on the reunion committee, there wasn’t a big rsvp yes response and they needed a minimum crowd to fill the venue, so she filled it out with some random friends and relatives, like me. It meant free food and drink, so I figured why not and brought a friend who had also gone to the same high school. It was fun enough and we ran into some people we knew, even though my sister had been several grades below me. My friend and I also crashed a wedding at the same venue next door, which was fun until one of the families recognized us as interlopers and kicked us out.
I would have gone to my 20th because of a weird coincidence. My wife and I were having dinner at a restaurant and at a big round table next to us were several women with a lot of paperwork talking something over. I wasn’t eavesdropping but it was impossible not to hear them, and I noticed them saying “what about Jane Smith- did we locate her? What about John Jones?” All names from my graduating class. So I went over and had a mini-reunion with women from my grad class who were planning our 20th. So I would have taken that as a sign from the universe that I should go, but as fate would have it, my wife was pregnant with our first child and the expected delivery date was within a day or two of the reunion date.
I attended my 30th (?) and managed to place my entire foot into my mouth. I was having a pretty good time, when a classmate introduced me to his buddy, Kevin McClatchy. At the time the name meant nothing to me, despite it being mentioned on the news regularly.
Kevin was living on a small yacht/houseboat at the marina where the reunion was held. He asked me about my opinion of the Pirates baseball team and I drunkenly laughed and called them pitiful, suggesting we change the topic of conversation to anything else. My classmate cleared his throat and told me Kevin owned the team.
I’ve been to a couple, but my high school is on the other coast, and for a couple of decades it’s been at a time when I had a professional conference. In addition, I and several others I’d want to see graduated early, so I would go to my scheduled graduation class’s event, but miss those other early graduates.
It’s also southerly, though in a blue community. Many of my classmates stayed there or went farther south, so I’m not inclined to be trapped with a lot of Trumpists for the night.
I happened to have moved back to my hometown by the time they held the 40th reunion for my high school, so I thought what the hell. I even helped organize it, using the web to contact a lot of folks. It turned out that a lot of those people never left Alaska and really never changed much. I, on the other hand, had seen my fair share of the world and have changed pretty dramatically. It was interesting to see them, but I wouldn’t do it again. I had little in common with the vast majority of them back then and still don’t. They’ve since had the 50th, and the 60th will be in another four years.
Embarrassing at the time I’m sure, but at least it’s given you a great story to pull out at parties (or threads like this)!
And it was probably good for the owner to hear somebody tell it like it is. He was probably surrounded by yes-men telling him “it’s a rebuilding year sir, you’re doing all the right things, it’s all good, etc.”
I’ve never been to one, but my 40th took place last weekend. I joined the Facebook group just to see who was in it, but with a senior class of around 950 people, sure I knew a bunch of the names, but only one out of the entire group was someone that I had hung out with in high school.
Part of recognizing the names was it being all those old student council, pep squad, cheerleader, sports, AP class kids. I basically smoked dope, played D&D, and worked full-time during high school, so I doubt any of them would even remember who I am (and I don’t even mean that in a sad way, I just mean we were in completely different circles).
ETA I admit I took a spin through many of their Facebook pages to see what had become of them. It being Texas, there were lots of Trumpers. Also, I swear a third of the women in the class were working in real estate. Probably not a bad gig at all given the market.
I think it was my 30th. I went with my best friend and a few others. And the bar tender is the best friend of my best friend. My wife was the DD.
I had a nice time. I wasn’t very social in HS. My best friend was, so she still knew a lot of people.
As much as I didn’t like the HS experience, it was a good school. And while people naturally sort of separate into different groups that you hang with (brains, jocks, stoners, arts, music). People really weren’t excluded from a group (clique isn’t quite right) because you where in another, there was a LOT of overlap.
I’ve been to two that formed an interesting comparison.
Dating a woman a year younger than I was, I attended her 20th with her. There was nobody else I knew, but there were slide shows and trite but entertaining games like “who came the furthest to attend?” and “who lives closest to the old school?” The speakers were actually fairly interesting. It was vaguely fun.
At my own reunion, a year earlier, there was an OK meal and a band so loud nobody could really talk to one another. No program of events or any speakers or activities. Crashing bore.
The only notable incident was when one of the former thugs apologized to me (over the deafening music) for being a bullying jerk to me in junior high and high school. More embarrassing than anything else, really.
One thing I noticed is that when you go to a college reunion, you pretty much know what those people are doing for a living (I was the exception: hardcore science lab guy then, snarky art teacher forty years later). And their personalities are pretty much to be expected.
But a high school reunion? You last saw those kids when they were barely out of their teens. And hadn’t had college/jobs/spouse/mortgages/kids kick their butts yet, or decided on a major, let alone a career.
I was amazed at the huge diversity of jobs/interests/causes they were into, and often surprised. Whoa, the stoner dude is now a CEO? And Mister “You wait, I’m gonna be Special Forces!” is now a hippie lumberjack, and he’s turning weird wooden bowls from his 'fellow inhabitants of the ecosphere."
So anyhow, a couple of old friends/acquaintances went out of their way to be nice to the nerdy little kid they barely talked to in high school. And they were interesting people… for perfect strangers.
It was a lot like my wife’s reunion. Halfway across the country, but we happened to be in her home town that weekend. She hung back and watched with the two friends she’d kept in touch with. Not me! I didn’t know anyone, which meant I truly didn’t care about how I came across, so I had a blast meeting new people… I had a much better time than she did.
I haven’t. Over the years I have bumped into old friends and on Facebook reconnected but a reunion isn’t something that has happened. It would take someone to set it up and I guess no one is willing to be the person who gets the ball rolling.
