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Visitor at a reunion
Aug. 28th, 2009 10:20 amLast night's dinner was a mini-reunion of 4 friends from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
davetrow's high school. They'd all been in Band together, and some of them had not seen one another since graduation (many, many moons ago). I was there as Spouse and Observer.
Now, the first interesting thing (bias alert!!) is that, despite having grown up in Glendale CA, which has got to have something in the soil that expunges all liberal ideas from the brain, these people did not toe the John Birch Party line. (I'm not kidding about Glendale; Beloved Spouse has said he never saw a black person until he went away to college.) (And no one ran screaming when I described the gay and polyamory themes of the current Darkover novel, so they passed that test.)
The next interesting thing was watching the conversation flip from past (stories of this and that, usually having to do with teachers or other classmates) to present and back again. Like a tennis match between a gorilla and a butterfly, with the gorilla representing high school. I was amazed at the detail with which these stories were related -- I certainly don't remember that much of high school! College, yes, but the Misery Quotient had begun to abate by then. 3 out of the 4 still played musical instruments; one ended up a music teacher. Because they were all in Band together, they ended up taking many of the same other classes, since Band determined the rest of their class schedules.
Sharing of present lives was minimal, except for one woman, the one who organized the dinner, who had/has a fascinating international career, received her doctorate from the University of Edinburgh, worked in such places as Bucharest, the Netherlands, and Macedonia, and has just been given the option to either retire or take a post in the Bahamas. (I liked her a lot and would have loved to talk more.)
After delivering my introductory speech (I'm a writer, this is what I'm working on, themes as discussed above, marriage equality is important to me because, among other reasons like justice, I intend to dance at my daughters' weddings), I mostly shut up and listened. I can never quite shut up, but I tried to be mindful that this wasn't my reunion, that these people might have things to say to one another.
My high school doesn't organize reunions, the last I checked. I've found a couple of old friends via the net, but no face-to-face conversations. There's the usual, "how did this person turn out?" and the occasional delight in discovering you now have far more interest in common than you did then, then being a time when you were both unformed potential, like marshmallows, that your friend has turned into a really cool person.
davetrow's high school. They'd all been in Band together, and some of them had not seen one another since graduation (many, many moons ago). I was there as Spouse and Observer.Now, the first interesting thing (bias alert!!) is that, despite having grown up in Glendale CA, which has got to have something in the soil that expunges all liberal ideas from the brain, these people did not toe the John Birch Party line. (I'm not kidding about Glendale; Beloved Spouse has said he never saw a black person until he went away to college.) (And no one ran screaming when I described the gay and polyamory themes of the current Darkover novel, so they passed that test.)
The next interesting thing was watching the conversation flip from past (stories of this and that, usually having to do with teachers or other classmates) to present and back again. Like a tennis match between a gorilla and a butterfly, with the gorilla representing high school. I was amazed at the detail with which these stories were related -- I certainly don't remember that much of high school! College, yes, but the Misery Quotient had begun to abate by then. 3 out of the 4 still played musical instruments; one ended up a music teacher. Because they were all in Band together, they ended up taking many of the same other classes, since Band determined the rest of their class schedules.
Sharing of present lives was minimal, except for one woman, the one who organized the dinner, who had/has a fascinating international career, received her doctorate from the University of Edinburgh, worked in such places as Bucharest, the Netherlands, and Macedonia, and has just been given the option to either retire or take a post in the Bahamas. (I liked her a lot and would have loved to talk more.)
After delivering my introductory speech (I'm a writer, this is what I'm working on, themes as discussed above, marriage equality is important to me because, among other reasons like justice, I intend to dance at my daughters' weddings), I mostly shut up and listened. I can never quite shut up, but I tried to be mindful that this wasn't my reunion, that these people might have things to say to one another.
My high school doesn't organize reunions, the last I checked. I've found a couple of old friends via the net, but no face-to-face conversations. There's the usual, "how did this person turn out?" and the occasional delight in discovering you now have far more interest in common than you did then, then being a time when you were both unformed potential, like marshmallows, that your friend has turned into a really cool person.
