Why I've Never Attended My High School Reunion

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt is "Have you ever attended your high school reunion? Why or why not?"

I never did.

Regular readers will remember that I never properly graduated from high school. I never even properly finished the first half of grade eleven. During what would have been exam week, snow fell. School was closed. Some people went back and took the December exams in January, I suppose. I had to help occupy my Aunt Dotty's rental property in Florida. We stayed through January and February, giving me time to take the GED exam. I actually studied for the test, and passed it with grades high enough to get me into college. 

This was awkward because I was sixteen; the so-called sexual revolution was still going on--AIDS hadn't yet put an end to it--and only a few church colleges with single-sex dorms and curfews wanted to take responsibility for easing me from high school social life into the chaos of contemporary college social life. Some friends went to Berea. Berea wouldn't have me. I had a limited choice of church colleges. One of them was Huntsville, the Huntsville, which had just opened its doors to legally White people, of whom I might have been either the fourth or the fifth one they'd ever accepted. I thought that might have been sort of interesting. "The school in Washington is closer to home," my mother pointed out. I went to the church college in Washington.

Some planned time for studying and, if possible, doing a part-time job before I went to Washington turned into unplanned time for grief and mourning. I could legally have gone back to high school, and (instead of giving me a job) our lawyer said I should have done that, but I'd beaten everybody else's time getting through high school and didn't want to go back longer than it took to clean out my locker.

In high school there were still divisions among grades based on when people started grade one, but nearly all actual classes were open to people in different grades. In most of the classes I'd enjoyed most, a majority of students had been in the class that started college when I did, and most of the people I'd found most interesting were in that class. I think of myself as having joined that class in grade nine, when most of my favorite people were in grade ten.

So when that class organized a ten-year reunion, I said I'd like to attend. The organizer of the reunion was not one of those favorite classmates and said, what a pity, all the invitations and reservations and arrangements had already blah blah blah. She knew and I knew that at least twenty people who'd said they'd be there wouldn't be. I figured life was too short to go to a gathering where someone didn't want me to be there.

Then a girl I had mostly avoided in high school called to say I could always come to the ten-year reunion of the class that had started grade one when I did. Well, it wasn't as if I'd spent two and a half years avoiding everyone who'd gone through the first eight grades with me. That particular girl had, in grade eight, once annoyed me enough that I sat down and wrote a list of the one hundred reasons why I didn't like her. Our parents had given up trying to make us friends by that time. I think the reason why she was still trying to act friendly might have been peer pressure about her claiming as a "boy friend" the little pest who had wanted to sit beside me in eighth grade physics to get mental inspiration from my test papers. I wasn't interested in "boy friends" and was actually glad that those two tiresome people had paired off, but some people might have thought I minded her distracting that boy from me. That would explain her trying to hang out with me when we were not and had never been real friends. In high school she signed up for all the easy courses and I signed up for the ones that promised a challenge, so I hardly ever saw her any more. I had other things to think about. Including boys who got their own A's on their own test papers.

(No, I don't remember the hundred reasons why, between grades five and eight, I had disliked that girl. I suppose they were all about the one thing: Introverts socialize differently from extroverts. I don't blame people for being extroverts, any more than I blame the lifeforms that, for whatever reason, God sent into this world as mosquitoes; I just try to minimize contact with both.)

So this woman called and immediately let fly a sneaky verbal attack. I thought, "Why would I want to spend a whole evening playing verbal abuse games with this person? That is sooo grade seven," and gave the second ten-year reunion a miss, too. 

From what I heard, enough people gave both reunions a miss that neither class bothered organizing another reunion. There are small high school classes that really are close-knit groups, even before everyone in the class is a seventy-year-old capital-S Survivor; people like this web site's late Oogesti really like spending an evening with ten or twenty people they knew well when they were in their teens. Then there are large high school classes where people may look forward to seeing ten of the hundred or two hundred people who might be invited to the reunion, prefer not to meet twenty more, and don't remember the others' names. The two classes with which I didn't graduate were large ones. 

I can imagine going to a fifty-year reunion, if anyone ever works out which one I should attend, just to see who's held up better than whom, putting together a photo album of "Now and Then" face pictures--but that doesn't seem like a particularly beneficial use of an evening.