Essays-Poems-etc about Reunions: {not inclusive list}

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Essay: About High School Reunions

by Anne Rodgers, West Palm Beach, Fla [Reprint AARP magazine March, 2012] AARP Magazine or Join AARP

Some people faithfully attend school reunions. Others scoff and wonder if it isn’t a bit crazy to fly halfway across the country to see folks who, except for maybe three or four, are not acquainted with who you are now and certainly don’t care. So why go?

My high school experience is best summed up as awkward and interminable. Though adulthood has shown me to be a clear-cut extrovert, I was unable to access that quality amid the agony of self-consciousness that drowned me in high school.

So — once a decade — reunions have become that rare opportunity for a do-over. I can mingle with people I was once too shy to speak to, be friendly, be the person I wanted to be in high school. It’s a chance to spruce up outdated recollections steeped in angst-filled teenage introspection and self-absorption. Rewriting history this way has become a big lure of reunions. But it didn’t start out that way.

Because I have not lived in my hometown since I left for college, I went to my 10th high school reunion out of curiosity. I was depressed and a bit horrified to find many classmates still clinging to their outdated cliques: Cheerleaders were still with cheerleaders. Same with the band kids and athletes. I went to my 20 out of perversity, I suppose, with low expectations — and was delighted to discover my fellow grads had come to see that what bound us together was much more important than those small differences that separated us in high school. It was a fun night.

My recent 40th reunion included a tour of the old neighborhood by my best friend from grade school. I was shocked to see that the lawn space between his house and the next-door neighbor’s was tiny, 4 ot 5 feet. I remember flying kites from that spot and learning to twirl a baton there, in what I’d recalled as a vast expanse. How could all those bright memories fit into such a small space?

At our high school, where my friend and I were part of the third graduating class, I teared up as we pulled into the parking lot. “Just think, 40 years ago this was brand-new,” he said. And so were we, I thought. We were embarking on complicated lives we could in no way predcict. In that moment, the passage of 40 years was an exceedingly difficult concept to absorb.

But those experiences are why I’m willing to make the long journey home. What a gift it is to come face-to-face with the tangible reminders of youth, which rekindle those priceless memories.

Reunion Poem

Every five years, as summertime nears, An announcement arrives in the mail, A reunion is planned; it’ll be really grand; Make plans to attend without fail. I’ll never forget the first time we met; We tried so hard to impress.

We drove fancy cars, smoked big cigars, And wore our most elegant dress. It was quite an affair; the whole class was there. It was held at a fancy hotel. We wined, and we dined, and we acted refined, And everyone thought it was swell. The men all conversed about who had been first To achieve great fortune and fame. Meanwhile, their spouses described their fine houses And how beautiful their children became.

The homecoming queen, who once had been lean, Now weighed in at one-ninety-six. The jocks who were there had all lost their hair, And the cheerleaders could no longer do kicks. No one had heard about the class nerd Who’d guided a spacecraft to the moon; Or poor little Jane, who’s always been plain; She married a shipping tycoon. The boy we’d decreed “most apt to succeed” Was serving ten years in the pen, While the one voted “least” now was a priest; Just shows you can be wrong now and then.

They awarded a prize to one of the guys Who seemed to have aged the least. Another was given to the grad who had driven The farthest to attend the feast. They took a class picture, a curious mixture Of beehives, crew cuts and wide ties. Tall, short, or skinny, the style was the mini; You never saw so many thighs.

At our next get-together, no one cared whether They impressed their classmates or not. The mood was informal, a whole lot more normal; By this time we’d all gone to pot. It was held out-of-doors, at the lake shores; We ate hamburgers, coleslaw, and beans. Then most of us lay around in the shade, In our comfortable T-shirts and jeans.

By the fortieth year, it was abundantly clear, We were definitely over the hill. Those who weren’t dead had to crawl out of bed, And be home in time for their pill.

And now I can’t wait; they’ve set the date; Our fiftieth is coming, I’m told. It should be a ball, they’ve rented a hall At the Shady Rest Home for the old. Repairs have been made on my hearing aid; My pacemaker’s been turned up on high. My wheelchair is oiled, and my teeth have been boiled; And I’ve bought a new wig and glass eye. I’m feeling quite hearty, and I’m ready to party I’m gonna dance ‘til dawn’s early light. It’ll be lots of fun; But I just hope that there’s one Other person who can make it that night.

The invitation to one’s 30th high school reunion brings about a plethora of emotions, the first one being how is it possible that I graduated from high school 30 years ago? The litany of other emotions includes the inexplicable onset of a feeling of failure, both in life and in weight management, as well as wardrobe panic and the fear that nobody will recognize us.

Oddly enough, we read the invitation with equal parts horror and curiosity, and almost instantly convince ourselves to attend. We urgently need to know who else is going, not only because we hope to be surrounded by comforting and familiar faces, but also because we need to make a mental list of those we hope won’t show.

As the day draws closer, we get excited about the prospect of seeing the “old gang” even if we never really had one, and we dig through boxes to uncover our yearbooks so that we can study up and hopefully identify fellow classmates with ease. Unfortunately, the dredging up of the yearbooks serves mostly to remind us of those people we do not wish to see, then to cement in our already-insecure minds how skinny and cute we were 30 years ago, and finally to refresh the memories of teacher’s names and shared experiences we want to be prepared to laugh about out loud.

When the moment arrives, we spend the day preparing ourselves to inspire squeals of “you haven’t changed a bit” and other sweet little lies that flow freely at 30-year reunions. We toy with the idea of inflating our accomplishments in life in case we are confronted with tales of grand accomplishments from those we never imagined would get a job outside the local burger joint. We brace ourselves for the moment when we look around the room and quietly ask ourselves who all of these old fat people are who are so happy to see us and seem to know us so well.

We slap on our name tags that often carry a photo from our high school yearbook, and boldly venture into the crowd, desperately searching for a friendly face. When we find it, suddenly we are 17 years old all over again, and all the things that we were so worried about vanish from our minds. We recognize everyone, even the guys whose name tag photos betray their bellies and bald heads, and we are so happy we came.

Who we are inside doesn’t really ever change. The packaging goes through some re-designs over the years, but the person inside is always that kid we knew in sixth-period English that knew everything one could possibly know about grammar, or the kid who always had a note from home that got him out of gym class. Welcome back, Class of 1982, enjoy your reunion! And here’s a tip for you: Write down the names of the people you snap photographs of, because trust me, when you go to share the memories with friends and family later, you will have no idea who those old fat people in the pictures are.

WHS 1983: Follow Randi Miller
on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Randi_Miller

Randi Miller, Voiceover artist and the ‘Voice of Metro’ in D.C.

Who got fat, who got hot, and is that old crush of mine still single? Whatever happened to that weird kid with the hair? Wait, am I the one who got fat?

Such are the essential questions at the core of every high school and college reunion. For decades, the routine has remained the same: a bunch of old classmates get together and catch up, settle (or renew) grievances and swap glory-days stories. Yet the ability to locate former classmates through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and, well, the Internet itself, has alumni organizations and other such groups wondering if the sun is setting on the traditionally organized reunion. (Read a TIME report: “Five Facebook No-Nos for Divorcing Couples.”)

Take Kim Brinegar, who in 1998 helped organize the 10-year reunion for her class at Maryland’s Arundel High School. “Back then, the Internet wasn’t really that reliable for finding people,” she says. “I had to rely on word of mouth, advertising in the paper and sending things to people’s parents.” For the 20-year reunion, however, she had a new tool: Facebook. Through the site, Brinegar was able to get in touch with tons of people she couldn’t track down last time around, including an exchange student from Italy who flew across the Atlantic for the reunion last November. (See TIME’s top 10 social-networking apps.)

Rather than turn people off from wanting to attend (“Well, smokin’ hot Sally looks just awful now — no need for me to go”), Facebook only increased the excitement for the 20th reunion at Massachusetts’ Sharon High School, says Holly Goshin, who helped plan the event. “It’s enticing. It’s like a little preview, seeing everyone’s life online. And whether you’re happy that someone is not doing as well as you or you’re happy that they look amazing, you get to see it all in person. Then you can move on with your life.”

But such self-organization is hurting businesses devoted to reunions, says Jonathan Miller, co-owner of Reunited Inc., a 20-year-old company that has helped plan more than 1,000 high school reunions. “It’s definitely affected our business,” Miller says. “Classes can now easily say to me, ‘Jonathan, we have 150 people in our Facebook group right now, and we really don’t need your services.’ ” (See 10 ways in which your job is going to change.)

College-alumni associations are dealing with the same issues. “Students now are all connected through Facebook and MySpace and other sites, so they leave college with their own network completely intact,” says Deborah Dietzler, executive director of alumni relations at the University of Georgia. “This is not like 20 years ago, where, if you wanted to get in touch with someone, you kind of needed to call the alumni office.”

On a personal level, Dietzler is a good example of how Facebook can hurt reunion attendance. “There was a Facebook page for my 20-year college reunion, which took place this May,” she says. “I looked at it a couple of times and it didn’t seem like anyone I knew would be there, so I lost interest.” (Read “Your Facebook Relationship Status: It’s Complicated.”)

Still, the idea that social-networking sites might kill reunions is a faulty one, because that would essentially mean killing nostalgia itself. While Facebook allows you to easily discover that your old pal Jack now has twins, it does not allow you to knock back a drink with Jack at your old campus dive (unless it’s a virtual drink, and where’s the fun in that?). What the Internet is doing is shifting power from schools to former students. There’s less need for snail-mail brochures and impersonal e-mails from alumni offices and businesses like Reunited Inc. when any former student can just form a reunion group on Facebook.

Marc Dizon was a class officer for Virginia’s West Springfield High class of 1999. Nine or so years later, dozens of former classmates began to e-mail him via Facebook to ask if a reunion was going to happen. The interest was there. “I don’t think reunions are redundant on account of social media,” he says. “You’re always going to want to see people face to face. And those who don’t go are probably those who wouldn’t have gone even if there was no Facebook.”

Mike Huynh, who helped organize a reunion for his 1998 Lowell High School class in San Francisco, says the gathering — which 214 out of about 600 class members attended — might not have happened if it weren’t for Facebook. “It made it very cheap for us to connect quickly with classmates and get information out to them. It was also easy to get feedback on what dates students prefer and, afterwards, on how the event went. I think that five years from now, the popularity of Facebook is going to make it an even more effective way to get people together.” (Read about using Facebook and Twitter to find a job.)

So reunions are probably here to stay, says Andrew Shaindlin, executive director of the Caltech Alumni Association and a blogger at Alumni Futures. But the real danger is that an end to reunions organized by alumni associations would make it more difficult for those associations to raise funds from former students. “It’s going to affect donations,” says Shaindlin. “We’ve lost our monopoly over the data on how to communicate with schoolmates. We need to step back and figure out how to remain relevant, because there may be some point three or five or seven years from now when we’re going to hold a reunion and almost nobody is going to sign up.” By then, however, alumni associations may have figured out how to tap donors via Facebook.

Time Article on Reunions being affected by Facebook
Visit above link to read article.