Wednesday, November 22, 2000
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Wednesday, November 22, 2000 |
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A sort of homecoming or reunited and it feels so good By
MICHAEL BOYLAN Some people say that you can never go back. This weekend, my girlfriend and I will test that adage, as we will be attending our high school reunion. It is a strange reunion in that it does not fall on one of the traditional reunion years. We graduated in June of 1993 and our class decided at our post graduation party to meet up in the most mystical of years, the year 2000. I don't know if we were expecting flying cars and dinner pills, but it seemed right at the time. It kind of makes sense when you consider that the majority of the people in my class were born in 1975 and now we are all a quarter of a century old. It is also strange for me because I did not actually graduate with my class. My family moved to Peachtree City from Beverly, Mass. in November 1992 and I moved with them. I graduated from McIntosh High School, but my roots lie up north. Several of the people I hope to see this weekend were people I have known since I was 6 years old. Reunions are amazing things when you start to put it all in perspective. I knew some of my fellow students in first grade, which was Ronald Reagan's first year as president. We were in the fifth grade when the Challenger exploded (our generation's Kennedy assassination) and sophomores in high school when the Gulf War began. We were in school before computers had CD Roms and graduated from high school before Al Gore's Internet really took off. I know what has happened to some of the people I went to school with, but I want to see what has happened to the rest of my generation. A friend of mine says reunions are lame, because the people that you kept in touch with are the only people you'd hang out with there anyway. He also says that you get forced into the same cliques and if you were such good friends with these people, you wouldn't have lost touch with them in the first place. I can see his point, but what about seeing the people that were friends but not close friends and networking with people with similar interests. What about seeing the failures of the people you disliked and talking behind their backs afterwards. That's part of it too, isn't it? Is it wrong to want to see the bullies of my school still delivering pizzas? I think not. It will be nice to see all the kids who thought they were so big and tough, now as adults scared and without a clue. I want to know who is married with children and who is already divorced. I want to see who became what. I want to see who is gay. Going to this reunion, I'm not as big a success as I'd like to be. I thought I'd be working for "Saturday Night Live" by now and bringing a Hollywood starlet to the reunion with me in a stretch limousine with a chimpanzee dressed in a tuxedo. Sadly, I'll be bringing only one of these things. The chimp's name is Mr. Nanners. Overall, though, the reunion isn't about vengeance or being mean spirited. It is more about remembering that time of innocence, where we had home room periods to complete homework assignments and study halls to goof off in. It is about seeing former crushes, people I just lost touch with and people I passed in the halls for years. Things always look better than they really were in hindsight and I can't wait to look back.
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