The Reunion(s)
My home town, November 8, 2004, 7:10 am
Today is the day of departure. I got up early to bring my
thoughts and impressions to paper while they are still fresh.
Saturday was the day of the big reunion. What a thought -
getting together with a bunch of former classmates, most of
whom I had not seen since graduating from high school. 20
years is a really long time.
A reunion stirs up strange feelings, feelings of curiosity,
mixed with a little bit of nervousness and apprehension. A
reunion forces one to think about one's life, the last 20
years, the decisions one has made, and their cumulative effect.
Time to take stock and reflect.
In high school I hung out with a group of 3 girls. The four
of us had a lot of fun, we spent a lot of time together, we
were all pretty good students, and sometimes we bugged the
teachers and provoked them with silly questions, just to distract
them from covering the material as required by the curriculum.
We played volleyball together, attended choir practice together,
went away together on various school trips and shared our
first steps into young adulthood together.
But I for one had lost contact. I left my home town at the
age of 20 and started a new life on a new continent. I also
felt quite ambivalent about my home town since the small-town
way of living and thinking had never been my cup of tea. In
addition, life in Toronto kept me pretty busy and as a result
I didn't really keep in touch with anybody back home. So the
prospect of reconnecting with people from my distant past
was exciting and nerve-wrecking at the same time.
I had already connected with 2 of the 3 women who were part
of our little posse and we had already spent many hours discussing
our lives, philosophies, experiences. Now it was a question
of convincing the 4th member of our high school gang to join
us. Three phone calls later and a meeting was arranged. The
four of us decided to get together at noon on the day of the
reunion which was to start later at 2 pm in a little mountain
village outside of my home town.
The reunion: 4 old friends from high school reunited.
Our meeting was great, seeing people I hadn't seen, whom I
had been really close to during an important phase of my life
was amazing. None of us had really changed all that much visually,
everybody was still slim and decent-looking. People now had
careers, family, children. We talked about old stories of
mischief and harmless juvenile errors in judgement. We shared
tidbits of our youthful ways of looking at life, our teenage
torments, and the twists and turns of our lives since then.
We finally convinced the fourth member of our group to join
us in going to the big reunion and we headed off to our meeting
in the mountains. Our class reunion was set in a beautiful
mountain restaurant in a quaint little alpine village. Unfortunately
the fog that had hung in the whole week was still hovering
above the landscape and no rays of sunshine were to be seen.
When we entered the restaurant we saw 2 tables full people,
about 20 people or so and we started making the rounds, shaking
hands, introducing ourselves. I immediately recognized almost
all my former class mates. There was only one person whose
hair colour had changed and who had gotten a bit bigger who
looked very different from before. Once we had exchanged photo
albums and once my school mates had showed me photos of what
this person looked like in the past it finally clicked and
I realized who this person was.
What followed was a long evening of chats, of reminiscing,
one of our school mates had brought super 8 movies that were
filmed more than 20 years ago at various social events, dances
and of course our big prom. Two of our teachers were invited
and they participated actively in the discussions and shared
their impressions of our teenage (mis)behaviours. It was amazing
how people's lives had turned out. There were engineers, doctors,
lawyers, teachers, architects, computer scientists, senior
managers and I guess I was a bit of a special case since I
was the only person who had emigrated and lived overseas for
the majority of my adult life while most of my colleagues
had stayed relatively close to home.
The atmosphere was great, very relaxed and joyful and everybody
looked like they were having fun. People were sincerely happy
to see each other. Plans were made to do this again in another
5 or 10 years, address and contact information was exchanged
and friendships were rekindled. All the nervous anticipation
was converted into giddy silliness and exuberance over reconnecting
with so many people from our shared past. I finally headed
home at 4 am after an evening of laughter and reminiscing
and this reunion turned out to be the crowning touch of my
trip.
Related articles:
Read about my
travel preparations for this trip to Austria
Here is my Austrian
travelogue that I wrote from an Internet cafe in Graz
My reflections as a new
writer kept me up in the middle of the night
The Homecoming - what did it
really feel like to go back home after many years...
For practical information visit my
country travel guide on Austria