I crashed a high school reunion last weekend. I not only didn’t go to that school, I’ve never even been to that town.
For background, I have not been and would not go to my own high school reunion. If I was invited, that is. Which I haven’t ever been. Let’s just say that there is no love lost there.
I ended up at this reunion because maybe a dozen or more students from this one high school in Southern California decided to go to college where I did. I became good friends with a few of them and hung out with many of them at some point. Dozens (maybe hundreds?) of meals, parties, mountain bike rides, hangovers, live bands, and questionable decisions later, there are bonds that have stood the test of time.
We started with nothing more in common than being young, being in the same place at the same time, and having, shall we say, a zest for life. We have pulled these threads of connection along from city to city, even to different continents. Sometimes the threads have been very stretched and have even disappeared for years, only to once again appear into the fabric of each other’s lives.
It wasn’t an official reunion, it was just the members of their high school’s Baton Rouge Cajun Cooking Club. Someone brought 11 x 17 black and white copies of a group photo of the club from that era. Fifty teenagers donning late 80s Southern California cool. Tie-dyes and thrifted dashiki shirts were apparently a strong local microfashion at that time. This hippie look was counterbalanced by at least as many kids in the photo throwing rock and roll hand signs. Disparate social groups presumably united around a common love for gumbo, music, and marijuana.
One couple had flown in from Paris to be at this reunion. Another from Ireland and another from Florida. Several people had driven up from Southern California. There were only 20 or so people at this picnic at a windy park in Marin County. No one from this high school club was both living in the same location and in touch regularly. They came from all parts, including halfway around the world, because of a connection they forged decades ago.
Listening to their stories of where life had taken them, I noticed that I didn’t hear a lot of talk about careers, homes they owned, or even places they had traveled. This is not how they defined themselves. They talked more about their lives now, their health, their kids. There was the occasional tale of shared misadventure from long ago but mostly it was about the here and now. Maybe it’s because it’s too hard to recap decades in a few minutes but I think it was more about a desire to connect around who we are, not the path that brought us here – centering our present, not the past.
Just two nights earlier I had been to another kind of reunion: a dinner with a handful of people to celebrate the 12th anniversary of the lifesaving heart transplant of a dear friend. We are all close to him but not to each other – it’s the love for our friend that has connected us all from a deep place for many years. All of us in midlife, all with children of various ages, we really appreciated a moment like this. A connection refired to celebrate, to honor something precious. When you are in the depths of parenting and life’s big responsibilities, these nights can feel like gems emerging from a dark field. This group reformed for this moment, then disassembled ourselves and went back to our daily lives.
Over that weekend I saw people in phases and activities that they never would have imagined as young adults. Living with someone else’s heart beating inside their bodies. Living with a slow gait after a traumatic brain injury. Rebuilding finances after a divorce. Co-parenting instead of in union with the person you thought you’d be with forever. Living with elderly parents. Renesting after the kids are out of the house. Launching another business. Moving countries. Loving again when you thought you wouldn’t. Burying the hatchet.
All of us were drawn back together not just to connect, but for the chance to rekindle the part of ourselves that existed before the weight of time had changed us, clung to our legs like mud, threatening at times to pull us into the morass, but somehow still letting us – so far – rise above.
Ideally, we wouldn’t wait for a reunion or a celebration to light that flicker of connection. We are lucky if we have threads from the past that we still want to pull on. I’m not saying it’s easy. I am not shy and yet I still felt a little weird about showing up to not-my-reunion. My fondness for the people I did know got me past it, and the new people I met were welcoming and kind. After all, everyone there was, in some way, strangers to each other. We have come so far and are so different to who we were then.
Maybe we don’t carry relationships along over time, but rather they are something that we continually choose to re-create.
We choose to keep the embers alive so we can forge that connection, again and again.
