Reunion 2
The final reunion is in the books. Anything we do going forward will be informal. I suspect there will be some of those. Most of the reunion crew still lives in Houston or close enough by that an evening meal somewhere is doable. Of course, we’re aging, and a semi-depressing number of our classmates were unable to make this year’s event owing to various illnesses but the drive to gather with your clan is pretty powerful. And we are a clan, bred in the commonality of an American public high school.
Of course, death and disease have driven away many of the pretensions and fears we might have had in our youth. My first reunion was the tenth and it was uncomfortable. It felt cliquish and I felt out of place. Luckily, somewhere along the line I realized it helped to make friends if you put yourself out there and let people know you were open for connection. That’s when I decided to join the organizing committee for our 40th reunion. Presto. I discovered some people remembered me and fondly, too. And even if they didn’t know me then they knew me now and that was nice as well.
Now here we are a group of survivors, blown by the winds of time to this corner of the universe, helping each other age, mourn our passing or passed spouses, and remembering our youth. It’s a collective effort, and a totally human trait because no one wants to face death alone. Or maybe it’s just that we’ve acknowledged our mortality and have decided that since we’re on our way out we might as well go out with people we like and for whom we’ll always be young.