I hadn’t intended to initially due to the COVID risk; feeling uncomfortable with the nightclub venue; and the same reason I stayed away from the 10th and 20th year reunions: not particularly wanting to see people who aren’t my friends – but I ended up going to our 30-year high school reunion last weekend. And I left with mixed feelings about it indeed.
One friend was intending to go but didn’t in the end, and another did, but apart from that I didn’t know who I might see there, and I was hoping to see a few people it would be nice to chat to. I arrived at 7pm on a drizzly, cool evening, and washed up with five or so strangers heading for the room in the large hotel where it was being held. On closer inspection I recognized some of them from my year, including Jo who I’ve bumped in to periodically over the years, and ended up talking to later in the evening about our similarly-aged children.
The venue was dark and very noisy from loud music and poor acoustics, so I had to shout to talk to anyone, something I never enjoy. It was a combined reunion with the year above us, so there were some people there that I had never spent any time with. The name tags and dividing the room in half for each year were very helpful, and I started out with a rather halting conversation with a couple of women who were in the year above me, one of whom had been a runner like me, so we reminisced about that until I broke off to ask for the music to be turned down a bit. It was, but didn’t make much difference. After that I saw my friend and joined her with relief, she was with a group of people we had hung out with at school, several of whom I hadn’t seen since I left. One of these, Tess, has four children and lives just out of town with her family, and it was lovely to see her again. She looked the same and sounded the same. I remember her so well as a seventeen year old, it was strange to see this grown-up version who I’d heard snippets about over the years.
I clung on to my friend like roots to soil, we had a photo taken of ourselves together, but we both knew we should talk to other people, so we joined a broader conversation covering the terrain of children and their challenges, which was nice but not very interactional. Then there were speeches covering both year levels. The organizing committee, my friend noted to me, were all women doing the work, as usual, but it was hard to hear what they were saying above the talking that continued in the room. I was disappointed in myself that I didn’t ‘shhh!’ the people around me. There was a toast to absent friends who are no longer with us, and something about the wild youth we had enjoyed in our school years. My friend left soon after.
I saw people flash by – middle-aged versions, often with different haircuts, of the young adults I had crossed paths with back then. I have aged like that too – my hair has lost much of its colour and is quite white at the front, and there are age-lines around my mouth and between my eyes. Why was it so shocking to see such changes in my contemporaries? Why was I surprised that so many of them are overweight, with their middle-aged years?
There was some intermingling, and other people were with the groups of friends they had had at school. I didn’t break in to those groups. A familiar face approached me and introduced herself as someone who used to run with me in our final years of school. She had had deep auburn, short hair then and it was wavy, blondish and mid-shoulder length now. Like some other people I spoke to, she was a primary school teacher. Her tall partner was an emergency doctor, having an extended break from work. She said that in her class of 26 Year Two students, six are on an Individual Learning Plan due to having additional needs, and yet there is only one teacher to teach them all. I said how much I admired teachers and what important work they do. I think I could have been a bit tactless in asking if she and her partner have children, it must be a tedious question when you don’t have any. I think a better question is asking what someone does in their spare time. After all these years, I don’t think I am anywhere near being proficient in the art of conversation.
My last conversation of the evening was with Kurt, who I had shared some classes with and who I also remembered well as being a very tall, pimply, shy adolescent who had been bullied. I had heard in the years since we left school that he was homeless. He confirmed that this had been the case, and that he had gone from our private school to being homeless for more than three years, after being beaten up and finishing his last school year with concussion arising out of that. ‘I don’t do much’ he said. ‘I was a DJ for a while, but the music scene died down in Victoria during COVID. I’m on the DSP.’
‘Our experiences in childhood can have a big impact on us as adults’, I said, in reply. We stood around near the bar with a youth worker who said he had also been bullied at school and works with young people because he knows what that’s like, and wants to help them. A third person who joined our group listened carefully to Kurt when he shared his story with us, and then shared with us that she found anti-depressants very helpful in managing her life. Before she shook his hand and wandered off, she leaned over to me. ‘You’re still as shy as ever. . . It’s nice.’ I didn’t find that reassuring.
It was 10pm by then, and I decided to leave. I had made a few good connections and had a few shouted, awkward conversations, and on the eve of re-establishing a new relationship to this school through Lara having decided to spend her high school years there, I have trouble arriving at what my feelings are about it and its role in my life. I wasn’t bullied, though I had been teased at times. I had some inspiring teachers who believed in me, and others who were just OK. A strong work ethic; the space to explore and be playful; exercise; participation in musicals; a sense of community; and the security of friendships which I still maintain – all of these took root for me in these years. School wasn’t everything, but these things have been positive in my life, for which I am grateful. Whether I attend another school reunion is another question.
