Column: A schedule full of reunions

Talk about it

Huh. It’s August already. My 25th class reunion is this upcoming weekend.

Well, at least one of them is. The other is next weekend.

Everyone should be as lucky as I am, to be invited to two high school class reunions. Twenty five years ago, I sat through two graduations, but I only accepted a diploma after one of them.

My family moved from Gaylord to Hastings when I was going into sixth grade. My class reunion this weekend is with the Hastings High School Class of 1986; next weekend is with the Gaylord High School Class of 1986.

Back in 1986, I’m pretty sure none of us saw the whole Facebook or Twitter thing coming. I was in typing and shorthand classes back then. To tell any of us we’d be reconnecting “online” after 20-some years would have seemed like science fiction.

But I’ve become reacquainted with both high school and grade school friends through the wonders of the Internet.

I knew I’d be invited to the Hastings reunion. I’ve made all of them so far, even the unofficial 15-year one at Dan’s Bar (if you heard about it, you were invited) in New Trier.

I think probably a third of my friends on my Facebook list are old friends from high school. I have conversations with them, make comments on the little trials and tribulations they post on their pages, stuff like that. There is a real chance I could walk right past one of them in a mall and not recognize them, but we’ll get a good laugh over that at the reunion, right?

But this other thing happened online, too - I reconnected with my grade school chums, too.

I will point out that I did, in fact, make the drive to Gaylord on graduation night back in 1986. I dragged along a friend from Hastings - my mom didn’t want me driving all that way alone - and we clambered up into the bleachers in the high school to watch the ceremony. I think there were probably about 40 kids in the class, so Gaylord’s graduation went a lot faster than my ceremony in Hastings did - we had somewhere around 288 in our class.

I was actually invited to the GHS class reunion before I received anything from Hastings. And to be honest, I was thrilled. I don’t know why, but I remember feeling a little panic, hoping that the two weren’t going to be at the same time because I may just have opted to go to Gaylord instead of Hastings. No offense to my Hastings classmates, of course, I just really wanted to see my grade school friends again.

As it happens, I lucked out.

But I think I lucked out in more ways than just the timing. It turns out, I’m pretty darned lucky that I have the opportunity to attend two class reunions. That I not only have people from high school who I want to see and who - presumably - want to see me, but that I get to reconnect with people I haven’t seen in more like 32 years in some cases.

I used to spend weeks getting ready for my high school class reunion - you know, work out as much as possible, shop for the perfect outfit, stuff like that. I worried I had to make some big, splashy impression. On whom, I don’t know. And it turns out, finally, I really don’t care.

I take it as a real sign of adulthood that I’m okay I haven’t lost the 15 pounds I wanted to drop and I’ll be lucky if I even have the time to put a fresh coat of polish on my toes.

What I’m excited about is that I can go to not one, but two reunions because people want to see me. Just me, the way I am.

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