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Reunions: A Social Occasion to Celebrate Aging
By Terry Ratner, RN, MFA
The party
I recently attended my 60th birthday bash. This wasn’t the usual party celebrated with decorated cakes, colored candles, gifts, and a crowd of one’s dearest friends and family. This gala affair reunited 160 of my senior high school classmates—all celebrating a milestone birthday.
I hesitated before sending back the curled and frayed R.S.V.P. invite, mainly because it seemed to resurrect memories of teenage struggles; the teen clicks, rivals, gossipers, and the usual back stabbing that many high school girls often display. It was a time of yearning and waiting—to wear lipstick, nylon stockings, a black dress, and a first cocktail. After days of debating the pros and cons, I stumbled upon the most persuasive reason to attend: a basic part of my being was buried there and I was on a mission to uncover it.
The experience
Walking into the restaurant, located at a favorite neighborhood hangout, (Old Orchard in Skokie, Illinois) was intimidating. Two balding older men and a woman dressed in black stood at the bar drinking out of martini glasses. I squinted as I tried to make out their names printed on their stick-on name tags. I didn’t have my glasses on for vanity reasons, so I asked them who they were. Both names drew a complete blank. Just then, a gal with black hair and blazing blue eyes approached me and said, “Hi Terry, how are you?” I must have looked confused as to who she was, so she said, “I’m Jill S., your best friend since we were six.” I moved closer and inspected her face, looking for a young girl who lived next door to me. It was then, an image of a small girl emerged and I felt as close to her that moment as we were forty-some years ago.
Details of our friendship surfaced and we talked about how we shared a children’s park which separated our houses—a place where we met and spent most of our younger years learning how to swing; legs out, body back, legs in, body forward, as we reached for the clouds. Gripping our small hands around metal chains, we’d twist the links round and round before unwinding like spinning tops. And there, amidst the flutter of orange and black butterflies, we’d whisper our adolescent dreams.
Round tables of eight were decorated with red and white balloons, our school colors. The old clicks were still evident, as the ‘collegiates’ sat together on one side of the room, while the ‘greasers’ sat on the opposite side. A video flashed senior snapshots, along with scenes from past football and basketball games. The DJ played our school song while a few cheerleaders tried to recall their dance routines. There was a cute blond pom-pom girl who gained 50 pounds and drank one too many. And the shy boy who sat in front of me in homeroom now sat at my reunion table acting like a party animal—telling dirty jokes and snorting when he laughed. A man with a handlebar mustache looked my way and said, “I was on the football team and always had a crush on you.” I leaned over to read the name on his tag, but everything was a blur. “I’m Al B.,” he added blushing. “I’m sorry, but I don’t remember you,” I admitted, “but why didn’t you just ask me out?”
A class photo was taken with the short folks in front. I stood in the back row next to Sharon G., who looked the same as she did in high school. Sharon wore lots of makeup, then and now. She used to entertain us with a different hair color each month. Today it was blond, cut in a blunt style. Her big brown eyes were bulging with black mascara, like a cat’s whiskers and eyebrows penciled in a soft blond. I realized after a ten minute conversation—she hadn’t changed at all.
The stuck-up girls were now "stuck-up older women" and many of the male hunks wore toupees and carried excess weight in their bellies. Yet all around me, through a mist of gray hair, love handles, and wrinkles, I saw children’s faces, rising essentially unchanged up through the grades.
Many of the people I spoke with played a huge part of my childhood. We attended the same grade schools, played softball, basketball and volleyball in the grassy fields across from the school. We withstood each others tragedies; losing a brother to leukemia, a sister who died from a drug overdose, and a mother who committed suicide. For many of us, these were our first introductions to loss—experiences which continue to connect us after all these years.
The analysis
The entertainment of the evening came from listening to high school friends who never left their high school days; the ones who knew everything about their fellow classmates’ progress throughout the years, including their failures, and humiliations. They quoted with authority the number of spouses, children, alcoholics, those who survived in business, and those who went belly up. It was as if they were in constant contact with our entire class of more than four hundred students.
The experience of attending a high school reunion is similar to being thrown into a room full of mirrors in which we are confronted by different visions of “self.” We see images of ourselves filtered through the lights and shadows cast by classmates’ memories. Suzanne D. recalled, “I remember when you brought a Rolling Stones song to play for our creative writing class. I thought it was so cool” An incident I had no recollection of. These reflections afford people an occasion on which to reevaluate their own memories and arrive at a new understanding of self.
A stream of old friends crossed my path that evening; some I’ve kept up with over the years, and others who floated back into my life after more than four decades. I saw goodness in people I had every reason to suspect lacked any redeeming quality. Either they grew out of something or I did, but either way, coming face-to-face with it was deeply satisfying. And in between the good and the not-so-good is a deep fascination with the story line—how my own youth is reflected in the lives of others. A lesson that our memorabilities are collective, that who we are comes from the horizons we share with others and the ways that our lives fold together. That’s what reunions are about—that and a bit of voyeurism. Okay, a lot of voyeurism and a deep fascination with how the characters in one’s life develop.
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