School Reunions – what IS it about them?

Don’t you sometimes just want to grab Time by the scruff of its neck and drag it backwards? Yell at it, “Stop moving! Stop running away from me! Hey, I haven’t finished here yet, dammit, I’m only halfway through … WAIT, can’t you let me take a breath before hurtling forwards again?”

And how does Time respond? It calmly and silently ignores your earnest supplication, and carries straight on with its ruthless forward journey, leaving you – at whatever point you currently happened to be stranded in your insignificant little life – behind. Just one more of Time’s countless, anonymous victims.

Okay, that’s a bit of a hyperbolic way of saying, wouldn’t it be nice, just occasionally, to be able to turn the clock back? I mean for real?

Backward, turn backward, o Time in your flight, make me a child again just for tonight!

I know how Elizabeth Aker Allen felt when she wrote those poignant words. Don’t we all feel them at some point in our lives – whether it’s our childhood or youth, or the past in general that we long for? The words could also be make me YOUNG again just for tonight! And this is where the entire phenomenon of School Reunion Nostalgia kicks in.

There’s something special about revisiting your schooldays – about reconnecting with people who were also there at the time, about visiting the same places, the same ground you trod on x number of years ago, when you were all different versions of the You’s that you are now – which can’t quite be matched by any other socialising experience.

There’s something special about the calibration of time, the synchronising of past and present, putting the clock back, challenging Time to take a breath – just this once, at least just on this one reunion – while you and your fellow time-travellers reconnect, remember, relive, rejoice. Never mind if you now fall into any of the following categories (please underline the appropriate choice of word/phrase): fatter, balder, greyer, wheezier, shorter of breath/height/sight, aided by chemical substances of a different type than in your naughty schooldays …

Ah, yes. That delightful word: naughty. A reunion wouldn’t be a reunion without at least a little hint of something naughty but nice, would it?

At the last but one reunion I went to (or was it last but two? – anyway, it was well over a decade ago) two alumni members spotted each other across a crowded room, and … well, suffice it to say that the evening became enchanted, and the couple in question are still romantically entangled now (much to the chagrin of one of the former spouses.)

And then at my last-but-one reunion, just five years ago, a similar romantic entanglement happened. (If you were there and want to know more, sorry, you can’t.) And now, at this most recent reunion of just a few days ago, I’m certainly not going to betray any secrets of what went on behind all those closed hotel doors – real or imagined.  Goodness me, as if I’d do that! I’m British, for heaven’s sake!

But seriously, what is it about school reunions that so compels some of us to keep attending them again and again and again? It’s not even as if our schooldays or our lives in general were perfect back in our historic pasts, right? I’m sure everyone reading this blog post will agree with that much at least. Take my own childhood, sadly marred by warring parents. (Mummy, why can’t you please divorce Daddy? – I once remember pleading after a particularly bad fight, as the beautiful Viennese sunshine permeated our beautiful Viennese home.) And school itself had its fair share of ups and downs. I was always the last to be chosen for ball game teams, for instance, being of the dreamy rather than sporty nature, and at the time that was excruciatingly painful. And at thirteen I was still way too much of a shy beanpole to be taken seriously by the love of my life back then, who, incidentally, happened to be at the last but one reunion (or was it two?) and apologised profusely for having once told me to fuck off. (Teens will be teens – I forgave him, thirty years later.) I could go on and on about all the pitfalls of growing up, but I won’t. At least not in this post.

The thing is, despite all the downsides to our transient childhoods and youths, there were still more than enough magic moments to make them last into the future, and grow in stature with the cascading years, and at some point along the long timeline of life that we all share, gain the status of becoming The Golden Era.

And now, umpteen years later, it really is that. A golden era. What does it matter if the reality wasn’t always quite so golden? The memory is golden, and that’s what continually brings us back together: back to yet another reunion, yet another prolonged slot of shared memories and thoughts and experiences and … well, sometimes a bit of shared spice too. And I don’t mean what you put in the cooking.

And so it is with heavy hearts that we say goodbye to each other, as yet another reunion comes to a close, with promises of See you at the next reunion bounding about amid all the clinking of glasses. And it is precisely at this moment, under the stars of a late summer evening, that we give thanks to the combined past, present and future on the ever-turning ferris wheel of our lives.