Last week I received a warning that the Old Boys Union (OBU) of my former high school was organising our 15 year reunion.
You know, when I was at school, I never thought I'd even live to be this age (or "that old", as I naïvely called it at the time). As they say, youth is wasted on the young.
I think our small group even agreed to meet up and throw ourselves off a cliff when we hit 30. Now we probably spend hours rocking ourselves and mumbling, "40 is the new 30 … 40 is the new 30."
These days, I complain about kids wandering the streets at night, looking shifty, when not so long ago, I was wandering the streets at ... well, I never wandered the streets at night, because I was usually home watching Neighbours and Buffy the Vampire Slayer instead. (Although I probably looked just as shifty and had the same bad posture.) I narrow my eyes at teenagers loitering in front of Chicken Treat and clutch my purse to my chest a little too tightly. And, perhaps most tellingly of all, Martha Stewart is now my god.
Anyway, I don't know why the OBU is so keen to get us all together again. What's wrong with a ten year gap between ritual humiliation? As I recall, they tried this before with a five year reunion, and the highlight of the evening (I heard) was our erstwhile Head Boy running around the bar with his trousers around his ankles.
Unfortunately, fate has caught up with me (a pox upon thee, Facebook!) and I've already received three messages from former classmates about this reunion debacle.
Reunions open up such a Pandora’s box of memories and emotions. You wonder if you’ll have anything in common with your old friends, if the boys you had crushes on will have enormous beer guts, and if the mean girls really did get the faces they deserved.
If you are particularly neurotic you may wonder if the people there
will look older or younger than you, larger or thinner. You might brood
on how to divert attention from your unwedded and childless state,
perhaps with tales of minor success ("I once ate a cheese wheel the
size of my head!"), and frantically search for ways to lose 20 kilos in
three months (that don't involve dysentery).
Will people recall the awful things they did to themselves and each other*, full of the ignorance and arrogance of callow youth? Or has it all faded into a tartan haze of mild chagrin and wistful longing? (Actually, that reminds me, our school hats were HORRIBLE. Who the heck pairs tartan kilts with Peter Pan collars and navy blue Akubras? It was a neo-colonial nightmare.)
Watch this space. Who knows? I might fork out the airfare and go after all.
And maybe, just maybe, I'll have a good time.
* To this day, swimming carnivals make my skin crawl.