Alone at the Reunion

Newsletter 2023-10-02

The Game of Thrones HBO series set up an entire time travel story arc to prove a secret royal marriage happened only to have a different character later prove the same thing just by reading an old book. If I spoiled the show for you, good. I spared you from the most disappointing final season in the history of television. Feel free to pay me for that great service. I accept Substack subscriptions, precious jewels, and bars of gold. The past belongs in the past, unchanged and, preferably, unremembered. I ignored my own advice this weekend (which is the only way my advice should ever be treated) and went to my twenty-year high school reunion. I’ve been out of school for longer than I was in it, which is inconceivable to me since preschool through college took a million years but the two decades after that passed in the blink of an eye. Time flies when you’re having fun but grinds to a halt when you’re learning about gerunds. Saturday was another learning experience. I discovered more about my classmates over two beers at a picnic table than I did sitting next to them in class for literally our entire childhoods. My ignorance is especially inexcusable because I didn’t have that many people to get to know. I was in a graduating class of fifty-four. Fourteen RSVPed for the reunion. Then I showed up and it was just me. Obviously the reunion for popular kids was somewhere else.

In reality, I was just early. I remained, as always, uncool. The class president sent out a Facebook invite for us to all meet at a brewery with tons of outdoor space that didn’t accept reservations. The invite said the event ran from noon to six, and we could all just show up whenever within that window. I assumed people would be there early since this was a family-friendly function and kids like to eat. Mine do anyway, but only when a grilled cheese sandwich costs eight dollars. They want nothing to do with it when I can make one for thirty cents at home. As usual, I failed to understand my fellow humans. My family and I were the first people to show up at the brewery when it opened. For fifteen minutes, we were completely alone. It was a great display to my kids of how popular I really was. The worst part is my kids weren’t surprised at all.

Eventually, the class president showed up. The best thing I ever did in high school was lose. I ran for senior class president and was utterly crushed. Actually, I have no idea what the final vote tally was, other than that it came out in my favor, by which I mean I wasn’t first. The real loser was the winner. That girl was our class president not just for that year, but also for the rest of our lives. She now bears the burden of planning our class reunions until the end of time, a duty she can neither pass on nor decline. These days, even the pope can resign, yet the obligations of the senior class president remain immutable. Someday, our class president will have to plan our seventy-year reunion from her nursing home—if any of us are still alive by then. I know I won’t be around. I’m barely holding on with one teenager. There’s no way I’ll survive the year that I have four.

Even if I don’t live that long, I already know what it feels like to be old. After our class president showed up, a few other people trickled in. Topics of conversation included all the things our bodies can’t do anymore and all the places our joints creak and pop. Besides our continued physical deterioration, everyone was the same as they were five years ago and the five years before that. I had the awkward privilege of asking them questions about their lives that I evidently asked them at the last two reunions. In my defense, I don’t even remember what I’ve been up to for the last ten years, so there’s no way I’m keeping track of them. I stuck around until 2 p.m., when attendance peaked at five classmates counting me plus a few kids and spouses. By then, my own children were getting restless. Open, outdoor spaces can only keep them entertained for so long before they crave the comforting glow of screens. Besides, I didn’t have much to add to the small talk. None of the classmates there were individuals I hung out with much in school. Not that, by the end of senior year, I really hung out with anyone my age. My main group of friends was a bunch of sophomores from the cross country team, and all but one of them has since moved away. The primary person I ended up talking to at the brewery was the husband of a classmate. He wanted to know about my workout routine. As every gym bro knows, hitting the weights will get you zero attention from women and entirely too much attention from other dudes. I decided to throw in the towel and retreat to my parents house for an afternoon of board games. The invitation for the reunion said that festivities would relocate to a different brewery downtown at 7:30 pm. I thought maybe more people would show up by then, so I promised to rejoin the group at the next stop. Not that anyone at the first venue was particularly concerned if they saw me again that day. Once every five years is more than enough.

At my parents house, I pulled my usual trick of bringing fifteen board games to play two. It’s good to have options. Shortly after 7 pm, I messaged the class president on Facebook to make sure people were actually going to the next brewery. I didn’t want to be almost stood up for a second time in one day. To my surprise, the class president and company weren’t at the brewery; they were in our former high school. An unnamed party with the key had let them in for a self-guided tour. I grabbed Lola and sped the half mile back to the source of all my teenage angst. It was immediately apparent that I didn’t need to go back. The place hadn’t changed in the last twenty years. In reality, it probably hadn’t in the last sixty. Lola likes to give me a hard time about how I grew up going to some ritzy private school. Nothing could be further from the truth. After seeing what the place is actually like on the inside, she’s going to have to find something else to make fun of me for. There’s no shortage of material.

The layout of the school is weird. Someone with a mansion donated their house and the land around it for a Catholic school in the middle of the last century. Rather than demolishing the mansion, the diocese had the bright idea to simply attach a school to the back of it. I should really put “mansion” in quotation marks. It looks regal from the outside, but inside, it’s not much bigger than a standard subdivision home, especially since so much of it is unusable. A classmate who got there earlier than I did said he went up to the third story of the mansion. In 2003, we weren’t allowed up there because it was unsafe. Nothing has changed in the intervening twenty years. The space remained unrenovated, and there were actual holes in the floor. The rest of the school wasn’t much better. It was a time capsule not to when we were there, but to when our grandparents were. Well, their grandparents. Mine were farming in Iowa. It’s 2023, and the building still doesn’t have air conditioning. Hopefully the plumbing works now. My favorite day of school was when we got dismissed early because the pipes backed up and the locker rooms flooded with sewage. It’s possible attendance has been affected by these glamorous amenities. When I went there, there were around 230 kids in grades nine through twelve. Now there are about 145, and that includes seventh and eighth graders stolen from the feeder elementary school. Even given all of that, it was surprising how many of my classmates now have their own children in the same Catholic school system. That should tell you just how bad the public schools are over there. Asbestos High remains the least bad option.

As we left the school, my heart swelled at the sight of other minivans in the parking lot. Half of my classmates had driven there in vehicles identical to my own. We’re all equally uncool after all. We convoyed downtown to a hip local brewery. The place shouldn’t have let me in, but I parked my minivan around the corner where they couldn’t see it. There, our reunion peaked at about fourteen kids. Actually, fourteen adults. It still weirds me out how a bunch of grown-ups stole my classmate’s names and faces. Aging is a scam.

I lack the proper motivation for a truly satisfying high school reunion story. There were no dramatic confrontations or big reveals. I didn’t have enemies to spite or lifelong allies to validate. I would describe my relationship with nearly everyone I graduated with as politely indifferent, and that feeling was reciprocated. I view my classmates as fellow survivors of some disaster, like a shipwreck or the wi-fi going out. We shared one memorable and unfortunate experience together, then went our separate ways. I’ve definitely grown up some since the last reunion because the things I’m jealous of have changed. I don’t particularly care about the wealthy surgeon who didn’t come back for the reunion, but I can’t help but admire the girl who bought a house across the street from her parents and married a dude who lives on the same block. I also respect the guy and his wife who now both work fully remote and can live anywhere they want. I can see the advantages of both being as close to family as possible and literally on the other side of the world from them. It all depends on if they beat me at the last board game.

I wasn’t exactly the life of the party, but I never have been with that crowd. I’m not a shy person by any means. I’ve done stand-up comedy in a packed theater and given speeches in a full auditorium. I’ve led completely ad-libbed workshops in front of total strangers without a moment of hesitation or self-doubt. My lack of self-awareness makes me unstoppable, yet among the crowd I went to high school with, I was suddenly a halting wallflower. These are the people who knew me before I became whatever I am now, not that I’ve morphed into anything worth bragging about. I’m a white collar drone who achieved minor internet notoriety in an extremely specific comedy niche in my spare time. Only one person asked about my writing career, and I didn’t have much to say. For all the shameless self-promotion I do online, in person, I’m the worst possible hype man for myself. It’s to the credit of the people I graduated with that no one really cared either way. I could have shown up rich and famous or flat broke and unemployed and they all would have treated me the same. Perhaps that Catholic education worked after all and turned us into accepting, non-judgmental human beings. Or, more likely, we’re all the protagonists in our own stories, and the reunion merely gave us a chance to satisfy our vague curiosity about what happened to the random background characters in our lives. Either way, I’ll be back for the next reunion in five years. I’ll take any excuse to buy a craft beer and an eight-dollar grilled cheese.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James