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I didn’t pay much attention to the ISU-OSU game, last night. I looked at the score once, around 10:30 EST, and saw ISU trailing 7-17. Which was relatively pleasing, given that my aspirations for the team consisted solely of losing by fewer than 30 points.

After that, having gotten up at 6:30 all week as part of this end-of-year deathmarch I’m working on, I called it a night. Then I got up and saw this:

Oh, baby

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Have you thought about going to a high school reunion? Good news: I attended one just a week ago, and you can share the benefit of my experience as you consider the prospect.

Note that I grew up in small-town Iowa, and graduated in a class of about 70, so your results may vary. That said, here’s a guide to who might, and might not, be at your reunion:

PEOPLE TO LOOK FOR:

Three near-interchangeable guys. Relatively different types 15 years ago, they seem to have converged since, like the tree of evolution in reverse. Now they’re all fairly mellow, affable suburban dads, with one or two little kids. They work middling white-collar office jobs; two of them even work for the same company. They live in a suburb of either the nearby city (e.g. Cedar Rapids) or the state’s other major city (e.g. Des Moines), but think about moving further out to someplace smaller, because the urban congestion of Clive makes them a little uncomfortable.

The girl you can barely even recognize. She’s put on some weight, but it’s more how her face has filled out; in combination with completely different hair and a lot of makeup, she wouldn’t have triggered the least notion of recognition outside of this context. As-is, you were only sure of her identity when someone  addressed her by name. If someone else told you, now, that “no, she wasn’t there, you must have mis-heard, that was so-and-so,” you’d think they might well be serious.

The girl who has not changed. Maybe Peggy Sue Got Married wasn’t quite that unrealistic, after all. After 15 years, this girl looks to have aged about a week; had her 33-year-old self shown up at graduation day, you aren’t sure anyone would have noticed. She also talks exactly as much as she did in high school, too, so you only heard her say about 25 words over the course of two-and-a-half hours.

The girl who shows every year and then some. By coincidence, she’s the sister of the preceding character, and you can’t help imagining some sort of Picture of Dorian Gray relationship whereby one sister does all of the aging for both. Though the fact that she has a 14-year-old daughter, already, and sits through the reunion with a cigarette in one hand and a can of beer in the other, may play some role as well. (more…)

When high school ended for me, fifteen years ago, it pretty much ended. Which, I suppose, makes me an anachronism in yet another way these days.

I mean, out of a graduating class of 70-some, I have remained in occasional contact with exactly one person. Otherwise, I saw a few people during my first years of college, but by the later years there I hardly even saw the other AHS grads who were enrolled at Iowa State. (ISU’s student population is about five times that of my entire hometown, of course.)

Since then, we’re talking “count on one hand” number of encounters with the people I grew up around. The occasional mention of someone or other has reached my ears while visiting family, but on the whole, I have no idea what’s happened to those people in the past fifteen years.

Which was probably not unusual, up until a few years ago… now, apparently, most people go through life digitally linked to pretty much everyone they’ve ever known since they were old enough to walk. I suppose that in a sense, my nonparticipation with this new social paradigm could probably be considered both cause and effect of my absence from Facebook; I’m in the dark about my high school classmates because I’m not on Facebook, and I’m not on Facebook for reasons including a feeling that I don’t really need to be electronically haunted by some sort of ghost-relationship with dozens of former associates for the rest of my life.

(With the passing of years it seems like many of the smart-remarks in Jennifer Marks’ delightful pop song “High School Reunion” seem instead rather presciently applicable to Facebook; “…if I wanted to know about your life, I would’ve called you on the phone, I would’ve let my fingers do the walking…”)

And yet I’m planning to attend a recently-announced 15-year reunion. (Which, naturally, was announced and is being organized on Facebook, and only came to my attention via roundabout means. I wonder if this is what it was like being one of the last people without a telephone line.) (more…)