Year 10 reunion

We had our Year Ten reunion the other week. I use the term ‘we’ loosely here – technically it was Maggie’s Year Ten reunion, not mine, as I attended a different high school. But I went with her given that I knew many of the people there from our years at primary school together.

Some people had travelled from overseas to be there, so the experience must have been a bit surreal seeing the changing city as well as the school they may not have visited for decades. I’m at the school twice a week though with the girls, so it’s very familiar to me and I have integrated memories of my childhood with thoughts of the girls being there now. Sometimes I share my memories with the girls: that’s the strip of asphalt beside the red-brick wall where we used to play handball; do people still play it there? Why not? We were so cold some mornings that we’d sit down beside those bar heaters and put our noses against them to warm ourselves up. I remember doing that with the other set of twins, Kathy and Peter – both always up for a laugh, particularly Peter who was mischievous and kind.

I was not the only one who was a little apprehensive, others admitted after we had said hello to feeling nervous too, including Sarah who told me in the first five minutes that they had named their daughter Ava in the end but one of her first choices had been to name her Isolde. I was glad people were wearing name tags, in some cases it took a few minutes to match the child’s face to the adult’s. My friends and Maggie’s I had kept in touch with, but some classmates I hadn’t seen since the end of grade six, thirty-three years ago. Some faces were thinner, hair coloured or greying, the children I had known buried in a stranger’s body.

We had opted to do the tour of the school, and it was led by an ex-teacher who manages its archives and history; a long history as the school will be one hundred years old in four years. There was a lot of chatting going on during the tour and the ex-teacher stopped and spoke to us sternly. ‘It’s very hard to talk when others are talking. I’m just going to wait until you’ve finished.’ Some of the corridors I had never been to, being in the high school. The science wing looked vintage 1960s and the woodworking area was dark and looked industrial without lights. Some classroom corridors seemed lacking in natural light, very different to the brand-new high school I had chosen instead. Initially the science rooms were locked and Emma, who currently works at the school, didn’t have her key with her. ‘That won’t be a problem with our life experience’, said Vanessa, who I remembered as being easily distracted in class. ‘Not me personally of course.’

Walking to the restaurant with Kathy, we asked each other about where each lived, how she came to live in Melbourne and how old each other’s children were. Lara and Rhea’s current teacher, who also used to go to the school and had in fact been in a composite class with me, had told me a few months ago that Peter died of a brain tumour at the age of thirty, so when Kathy asked me if I had heard about him I could talk about that without her having to deal with my shock at the news.

At the bar we met others who had chosen not to do the tour, Claudelle and Stephanie among them as their children had all attended it. Both had had children relatively young and their eldest were in their early twenties. I regretted not having asked them to see photos, I would have been interested to see how their children looked.

Stephanie said that she worked as a clown doctor at the hospital and she had hated high school because she wasn’t in the cool crowd. She started writing her blog at around the same time as I did and I used to really enjoy reading her stories about her adventures in parenthood: thoughtful and well-articulated reflections on what a lifesaver playgroup had been; ominous silences and late-discovered destructions wrought by babies and toddlers while she was talking on the phone; home-made birthday cakes and how to make them look amazing with minimal effort; the complete satisfaction she felt with throwing away broken and outgrown toys (did I mention I took a car boot full of no-longer needed toys to the girls’ preschool fête this weekend. Bliss); and reflections on having just the right sized family for her, and the sadness that sometimes came with joy on achieving milestones with children growing up. She stopped writing the blog to spend more time writing longer pieces. I also regret not asking her if she’s still writing and saying how well I think she wrote.

Dinner seating can be nerve-wracking. I sat next to Suzi, who I had also always liked, and we talked about her work as an industrial designer who makes pieces of furniture by hand, and her children, both almost grown up. On my other side I sat next to someone I didn’t know. The conversation was fine, helped along later by the quiz about things that had happened in high school and world events/pop culture of 1989, where our table performed quite well despite Maggie and I being as clueless on the pop culture front now as we had been then. In between I chatted with Loretta, who still seemed shy and whose children also go to the school; Emma who I see regularly at the Farmer’s Market; and Maggie’s friend Hélène who had lost both her parents in the intervening years – suicide and cancer – and lives on a French territorial island north of Fiji with her two children. Before we knew it it was eleven pm and Maggie was ready to go.

I had a quick question-and-answer session with Jan who with Emma had organized the reunion about what work she does in Sydney (she was as open and friendly as ever and her two teenage boys had her bright red hair and the oldest looked just like her) and Hope, who was also friendly, asking where I had disappeared to for high school and that no-one told her anything. Talking to Stephanie I overheard snatches of stories Hope was telling that didn’t make sense: how she had hung out with Phillippe, our year 2 French teacher, as an adult in New York where they had snorted coke together. This was the teacher who, on the day he returned to France, had half the girls in Year Two in tears, including me, at the sadness of it. He was leaving with Sylvie who he said was his sister but we suspected otherwise when we saw them holding hands.

‘Are you on Facebook’ asked Hope as we were leaving. I replied no and that Maggie wasn’t either. ‘How about Linked in?’ I said I was but that I didn’t use it very much.

‘OK I get it I get it’ she replied, no doubt pretty drunk. I felt guilty, so looked her up on Linked in and connected the next day. She’s had a colourful life it seems, living for twenty years in the UK and US. Her CV noted that Barack Obama followed her on twitter.

I met up yesterday with a friend from the high school that I did go to, and mentioned that I had gone along to the Year Ten reunion of my old school. She said that she was finished with reunions after the last one which apparently ended in a food fight of beautifully decorated cupcakes (was this a ten year reunion? Surely not twenty?). It reinforced to her that she sees the people she wants to from school and doesn’t want to see those she doesn’t.

I felt like that after a smaller reunion I went to last year, but I’d say that I was glad to have gone to this one. If going with an open mind it gives you the opportunity to reflect on our lives and education and reconnect with people who we may not have much in common with, but who have interesting stories to tell.

I’m sorry I didn’t stay longer to hear more of them, or ask people to reflect on these things. What did my primary schooling give me that I might not have got elsewhere, apart from a knowledge of French and an interest in languages? Did that exposure and a multicultural environment give me my lasting appreciation of other cultures and perspectives or might I have developed that anyway through the travel I subsequently did? Was being an average student in a class of high achievers good for me or would it have been better to have been a high achiever in an average cohort? I was conscious in primary school of a sense of superiority, learning French in a bilingual program, and I’m not sure that that’s a good thing. I chose to attend a different high school and that certainly gave me space to develop my own identity which I think was important as a twin. But I’ll never know how I might have felt or changed had I stayed at the same school. I felt for a long time that I didn’t have enough time and distance to be able to objectively answer the question of whether my schools were good or not. Like my home life, they were safe and stable and supportive and I responded to their structured curricula. I had good friends in both my schools and felt a sense of control over my life, both I think very important things. And I certainly absorbed a strong work ethic from my schools and family. If these are the criteria for a good school, then my school was good.

I would have been interested to hear of what my former classmates think about that.