One Thing Or Another Column: Reunited And It Feels So Old

By Mark McNease

Nothing snaps you into awareness of your age quite like someone’s sudden death or a high school reunion invitation in your mailbox. It’s basically an embossed reminder that time has in fact passed. Suddenly you’re wondering what everyone looks like now, who’s collecting Social Security, and whether anyone else still remembers you making your escape to California in that orange Gremlin three days after you got your diploma. If you’re like me, you never looked back, at least not too closely, until that invitation showed up and you wanted just a peek at the old gang.

I couldn’t go the year of the 45th reunion, and I’m quite certain I’ve got plans that will prevent me from attending the 50th (and if not, I’ll make them). Still, there might be a strange thrill in seeing how this many decades have treated a group of people I once glared at across the cafeteria while they ate at their invitation-only table. I’ll just have to squint at the photos online like everyone else and marvel at how none of them look the same.

IF YOU’RE READING THIS YOU’RE probably old enough to remember the 1978 hit, Reunited, by Peaches and Herb. That song came out a year after my high school graduation, and it seems an appropriate choice now that I’ve been invited to our 45th reunion. I can’t make it this year because we’re going on our annual vacation to Provincetown. Had I been able to attend, it would have been a first: I have not gone to any reunion since leaving Indiana three days after snatching my diploma and packing up my orange Gremlin to head to California. It was a stick shift with no spare tire, but I made it across the continent, and only went back every year to see my parents until they passed away. After that, Indiana became a place to store memories, some of them great, many of them deservedly faded.

I’m not someone who insists that age is a number—tell that to my bones. Age is real. Days pass, weeks pass, years pass, and every living thing ages in the march of time. I’ve also given instructions to euthanize me on the spot if I ever say that anyone is so-many-years young. I would be mortified as well as humiliated if, should I live that long, anyone calls me ninety years young. It’s patronizing and patently false.

I enjoyed getting an invitation to the reunion. I tend to think of high school as a place I’d wanted to escape, never to return. But then came Facebook, and the occasional friend request from someone I knew in childhood, whether that childhood was second grade, in one case, or high school, in several others. I often envied people who’d had close friendships that endured from the early years of their life to the present. In some ways I am one of them, having reconnected with a handful of people after years of radio silence. But in other ways I am not; I don’t have any truly close friends who have been my confidants for more than thirty years. Once I’d headed off in my packed car and driven to the toll road, I did not maintain close ties with anyone outside my family. So it was, but suddenly I’ve found myself invited to a reunion I’d like to attend but can’t, if only to satisfy my curiosity. What do the people I knew forty-five years ago look like? Who has passed away, and who has started taking Social Security, as I have?

I believe in living to the fullest and appreciating each day, regardless of my moods and insecurities. I’m happy to have lived to sixty-three, yet applying for Medicare next year seems like a milestone I’m dreading as much as I’d anticipated it, waiting to finally have health insurance that wasn’t dependent on a job. Life gives with one hand, and takes away with the other. If only I could stop the clock now, but I can’t. I’ll check the high school Facebook page set up for my class. I’ll stare at the photos of the reunion they post, trying to identify faces I haven’t seen in over four decades. And I’ll promise myself I’ll get there for the next one. If I’m honest about it, I have to ask how many more there can be. Going to a high school reunion at this point may truly be a once in a lifetime event.