It is the summer of my 50th high school reunion, an event I have elected to miss. I have some modest curiosity about what everyone I once knew has done with their lives, but not enough to travel to Eastern Washington to find out. My interest, after all, is mostly mild curiosity, and not strong enough to compel me to leave the Farm at a time when the days are long, the sun is shining, the birds are positively joyous with song, a mysterious large toad has been seen in the driveway, and my front porch is calling me to come enjoy these precious days.
Maybe I would have gone to the reunion had we not just been abroad for the last thirty days, since the trip left me desirous of putting down roots at home for the summer. I have had all of the novelty of new places that I can take for this year, at least. The view from my front porch never looks as good as when I have been away from it for an extended period.
But I doubt I would have gone to the reunion even if we hadn’t been away. In accordance with their essential nature, reunions are surface-only events. By “surface-only” I mean they are little more than one long cocktail hour extended over three days, at which gossip and abridged life histories are exchanged repeatedly and repetitiously with a string of folks who share with you only a common beginning rather than fulfilled lives. Many of those you meet at reunions have so little in common with you after 50 years of lack of contact that they may well be the sort of person you’d dismiss as uninteresting on sight if you hadn’t once known them, with whom you wouldn’t begin a conversation if both of you were truly strangers meeting for the first time in some far-off, foreign venue and were the only Americans in the room. These are folks you would only speak to at a reunion: where shared memories of long vanished athletic prowess, deceased teachers, formerly titillating events that seem tawdry in the afterlight, and the oddities of characters dredged up from the mists of time serve as the bare, essential minimum of commonality necessary to sustain the facsimile of a conversation held across the vast gulf of social and cultural differences lying between you.
I don’t do well in cocktail hour settings for the simple reason that I don’t care for the taste of alcohol or appreciate its effects, and I detest gossip. I also dislike highly abridged life histories since they always prompt me to begin asking questions designed to elicit additional data, and cocktail party settings have too much background noise to discern the nuances of answer, are too short to spend significant time with anyone in particular, and are far too public a venue in which to ask necessary questions.
What I can recall of the few reunions I’ve attended is not conducive to tempt me into repeating the experience. I don’t need to listen to recitations of long gone glories that have been enhanced in importance by the gloss given such memories by the passage of time. I have enough trouble remembering my own life history through the fog of time. I don’t need to spend time with folks who had a better life than you regardless of the life they’ve actually led. You don’t even have to ask these sorts of folks anything, since everything is volunteered immediately upon re-introduction. I don’t need to spend time with folks whose life has always been miserable and worse than mine, for I can’t stand being depressed while consuming alcohol in a crowded room.
I don’t need to travel 500 miles in order to stand in a corner of a room filled with strangers, for corners are where I always seem to find myself during cocktail parties because they are a place of relative privacy, a safe-house from noise and confusion, and great venues for people watching – something I enjoy immensely. I suppose if the corner were in some exotic locale, it might be fun to go to my reunion. But my home town is only exotic for those who drink wine in quantity and want to go to a remote location to drink quantities of it or visit wineries. Since I don’t care much for alcohol in any form, there is little for me to think of as exotic in a town that looks exactly the same to me as it did 50 years ago when I was young and could hardly wait to escape its tentacles. I am incapable of seeing the town with fresh eyes, for it holds too much personal history.
If there were an exotic venue where I could sit down with one or two former classmates and have a serious discussion about life, about the Vietnam War, about the pleasures of travel or reading, or about any other subject of more than passing mutual interest explorable in intimacy and depth, I might eagerly attend the reunion. For discussions of this kind with a selected few friends from long ago would be scintillating and interesting. For we were creatures of the 1950s and early 1960s after all, a period in which a pervasive sense of safety gave way to dramatic, culture changing events. By the time we graduated from high school we were on the cusp of a national climate fraught with drama, full of life changing events that affected all of us in some deeply personal manner. How many of us were subjected to the draft, for example, and who ran from it, who fought it, and who served their time if taken?
But cocktail parties are about gossip and titillation. They encourage only elevator speeches – those memorized bits of recitation that are designed to sum up a life in the time it takes to ride an elevator to the highest floor in town, and my home town hasn’t any buildings over 10 stories. Elevator speeches are profoundly uninteresting, since they are marketing pieces designed to deliver an impression rather than substance, to be a door opener rather than a truthful recitation of a life story. I can hear those from strangers right here in Seattle and save the gas it takes to travel to my home town. Hell, I can even listen to my own!
If I were able, I would really like to talk to my high school friend Larry, the guy who went to the Air Force Academy and is now apparently an economic consultant in Boston. But Larry won’t be in attendance, for he hates our home town and has never been back. I would really like to have a female friend explain about the rather enigmatic email she once sent me hinting at a wild 60s life spent in the Haight/Ashbury district of San Francisco, but there wouldn’t be enough time to build the trust required for such a story to be shared. I would really like to know what happened to my friend Jay who died in 1980 as a result, I believe, of the effects of his service in Vietnam, but it is the wrong venue in which to ask Jeanne, our fellow classmate who grew close to him before his death, about how and why he died and how he earned a bronze star.
In other words, I am not attending my 50th reunion due to a lack of interest, but for the lack of time for proper conversations, a lack of those in attendance of real interest to me, and a lack of opportunity for the type of discussions I always enjoy having. Add to this that I have no wish to stand in my corner and watch former classmates enjoy the gossip I abhor; add to this the fact that many of my former classmates want each of us to be exactly the person we were 50 years ago when unencumbered by a full life, a condition to which I have no wish to return; add to this the fact that I don’t care for some of my former classmates and never did. The resulting total lacks any significant attraction.
And so I am staying on the Farm to enjoy my front porch, the bird song, and these graceful summer days. I would gladly share the peace of the Farm with any classmate who might happen by before or after our reunion weekend, but I realize that this notion is only the stuff of daydream. But if they were to do so, I have an exotic venue to share. For on our front porch we would have all the necessary time to catch up on subjects too awkward for large rooms where cocktails are drunk to excess, on subjects too intimate to be shared with a dash of titillating gossip.
So if any adventuresome former classmate happens to read this piece and has the courage and interest to have a thorough front porch conversation, just drop by unannounced some nice summer’s day and we’ll enjoy a glass of ice tea along with an exchange of life stories and mutually interesting ideas, whiling away our hours watching shadows steal across the grass as evening descends.
