Reunions, reunions! -A belated postscript

Reunions, reunions!  (A most belated postscript, one year later, of a Class 61 member)

Our 50^th high school reunion. Fifty years (or half of a century) out of high school is a very long time: If we are not exactly old, we are quickly approaching being so. No exceptions.  It’s a case of repeating over and over, “I can’t believe I’m going to my 50th high school reunion!” expecting that by repeating this enough times you’ll discover that you probably made a mistake. You will hear your flatterers exclaim, “Well, and how could you possibly be going to your 50th high school reunion? What is your secret? You look so darned young!" — a response you get less often than you’d think, even though it seems the logical, polite thing to say.
I think we all looked forward to our own 50^th reunion. Why, is a big mystery.  Did we like high school?  Did high school like us?  In the early sixties, we had many blights, given that the adolescent mind had not yet matured.  We did crazy and rebellious things, such as moderately-harmful pranks on our classmates, our juniors, on the school.   
But looking back on these, we dismiss them and relegated these to the back burner of our memory bank.  Eating green mangoes and bagoong and missed out on a class and was discovered by a teacher.  Copious tears when our candidate for an office was defeated.  Learning a folk dance in our bare feet on the auditorium floor.  Trading Munar noodles or Vienna sausages at lunchtime. Big surprises on scores gained during the grading periods ("wasay-wasay", a code for 77; "cheenta" for 80, "beenta" for 90 and so on).  Cheering on Pete as he clears the 100 m dash.  Yet they come alive, in reminiscing these stories, falling short on the negative side and puffing up the selective memory side.  The reunions are a catalog of such stories.

A bunch of us have been in touch in one way or another:  visits to Baguio, Facebook, Yahoo groups,  email, phone, dinners at  Manila restaurants.  Half-hearted or full-hearted efforts were made to track down more. The majority in our class had simply fallen off the radar.

As the day approached, our collective anticipation increased. We look through our wardrobe and try out something suitable to wear. We calculate the many complex factors  that go into what to wear to a 50th high school reunion. We want to wear something that evokes our high school selves while making it clear that we are no longer the absurd persons we once were. We wanted youth but also wanted grownup poise. That is so much messaging to pack into a dress and requires much trying on and taking off of various ensembles and accessories. The dressing up angst.  Timing hair coloring so that the roots will be definitively out of sight is in our calendars: a   difficult task, given how quickly roots have a tendency to assert themselves.

As we all know about things we look forward to: first they are a very vague idea, then a closer and more anticipated prospect, and then finally, they’re upon us. That’s how time works most of the time. No matter how far away something may be for a while, soon it’s a lot closer, and before you know it has come and gone.  This is about the reunion but it could well be the fifty years since high school, or, for that matter, life itself,  which is why a reunion carries such weight. If 50 years can go by so fast, you have to figure that you’ll be dead in the space of a second.  Morbid thought.

My class reunion (2011, Class 61) was like my child’s coloring book, finding pages and  coloring the hidden things in a scene:   vaguely familiar faces emerging from double chins, once-known eyes and noses obtruding from white whiskers. Recollections, flattery, conquests, sour grapes, parading spouses and an indescribable uneasiness associated with high school – went flying by as we greeted each other. We talk to people we never said a word to in high school. “So and so is no more”- but their child-selves are still vivid in our memories. 

When the big event was over, our classmates agree that it had been a big, grand and repeatable success. We had had a good time talking, dancing, and posing for photos. Everyone is relatively much nicer than they’d been in high school, which makes sense, since everyone realized that being nice was the least you could do, given that life is hard and we’ve all been trampled on by it to some degree. 

The days following puts us in a funk, a kind of sadness in reliving memories, and a hint of we could do it over and get it right.  But the feeling remains, that the reunion is a marker for the end of our childhoods.  To touch those classmates was to get as close as we could get to remove that space  between then and our opening into adulthood with its responsibilities and strains.  We have turned out fine.  We yearn to do better.  We still are afforded that window of opportunity.  Til the next reunion.  It is going to happen.