Eric J. PerkinsI remember my 10th high school reunion fairly well. I’d recently moved back to New England after spending much of my twenties in North Carolina, so I didn’t need to travel far to my home town of Wolfeboro, N.H. I genuinely had no idea what most of my old classmates were up to. Mark Zuckerberg had only launched Facebook at Harvard a few months earlier, and there were no pervasive social media platforms for sharing pictures and life events with old friends. News of the reunion was spread through emails and phone call chains.
It was a good turnout. A lot of Kingswood Regional High School’s class of 1994 showed up, and many of us — including me — brought our spouses or partners. A few people had kids and good jobs already, but most of us were still figuring out what we were doing with our lives. At 28 years old, or thereabouts, there was still time to establish careers, buy a home, and start a family. We didn’t look or feel that different. We still felt young.
I missed my 20th reunion, but I attended my 30th a few weeks ago. Twenty years can make a big difference, both in the world and in human beings. It’s hard to say why relatively few people attended — fewer than 20% of our class. Perhaps many people felt Facebook and Instagram eliminated the need for high school reunions. We’ve seen the pictures and learned about life events on these platforms, so there are fewer mysteries to solve. People are busier, because many of us do have kids now, and those kids have camps and clubs and sporting events to get to. That’s also probably why fewer spouses or partners joined this time around. That, or because people have come full circle and are single again.
As I pick up my name tag, which also features my senior picture, I realize I’ll have to rely on these more than I once did. Memories fade, and with the possible exception of my friend Tom who has somehow defied aging, many of us look quite different. The loss of my own nearly shoulder-length curly locks rendered me unrecognizable to some.
The stories we share with each other are a mixture of reminiscing about the past and standard middle-aged fare. There’s worry about paying for our kids’ college, taking care of aging parents, or mourning the parents we’ve already lost. There’s a bit of complaining about our own physical ailments, but we also share some cool accomplishments.
My friend Katja designs crossword puzzles, and recently had one published in USA Today. A former classmate named Michelle recently started her own business, on top of already working a full time job and raising three boys. One guy even talked about writing a Gen X column for his local newspaper!
When the official event ended, we migrated to the one bar in town that was still open past 9:30. It was pretty packed — full of people half our age. As my friend Pete pointed out, most of the folks patronizing this bar were his oldest daughter’s age.
There was a band, and it was loud. We had to yell at the people sitting right next to us in order to be heard. “Can you believe we actually liked doing this once?!”
A woman who was a few years behind us in high school happens to be there. Someone asks if it’s true she’s a singer. She demonstrates her singing — a little drunkenly and very loudly — into my friend Jessica’s face. Before she walks back into the crowd, she proclaims “I love you guys! And always remember — I WILL ALWAYS BE YOUNGER THAN YOU!”
I laughed a lot that night, and though our collective sense of humor has grown a bit more acerbic as we all plunge rapidly towards our fifties, laughing with people you’ve known for at least 35 years has a special, ineffable quality to it.
As my son enters his senior year at Belmont High, I wonder if his generation will even have high school reunions. I hope so. There are some stories that just don’t have the same impact when they’re shared over social media. Sometimes you have to hear the stories told in a familiar voice, from a familiar, if slightly more wrinkled, face.
Eric J. Perkins writes about Gen X for The Belmont Voice.