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Sunday, September 12, 2010

Re-visiting Reunions

Basil and I were engaged in fascinating discussion recently, as we often are, being fascinating discussants. The topic came up of reunions. The idea of reunions baffles Basil, they bewilder and befuddle...badly; beyond that, Basil is bemused by the bastion of importance people attribute to these bouts of bygone-buddy brou-ha-has...(whew!) I had a high school reunion recently which I had thought about attending. I've gone to ones in the past and found them fun and interesting. Seeing old friends I had forgotten, reconnecting with people who I genuinely liked in high school, but I suppose not enough to continue on with in life. I think this is true for most of us. We make intense, passionate connections with other kids in junior high and high school and those memories last the rest of our lives. But are all those people still in our lives? Usually, no. We go to college or get a job, months, then years pass and the intensity we felt so strongly diminishes over time. And this is the part Basil has a hard time with; if someone is a friend, then why don't they continue to remain a friend throughout your life? Basil believes if someone meant that much to you, you wouldn't have let them go. I don't think moving on means those experiences weren't important. Much of that time in life is...life-defining; it helps shape who we later become. And that may be part of the attraction. The stereotype of reunions is that it's a time to show off how successful, pretty, accomplished, wealthy, etc., we've become compared to our classmates. I agree that that type of thinking may be a piece of it, but that alone doesn't explain the popularity of the reunion over the past centuries and many different settings. There's many kinds of reunions other than high school; college reunions, sports team reunions, specific activities (dance, theatre, departmental). The "showing off" theory doesn't hold because, if it were true, the ONLY people to attend reunions would be the "successful" ones or those who believed they were. Many people truly wish to reconnect with the feelings and energy they felt during that time and with those people, to remember what they had forgotten, to remind others of the good and horrible times they had. To relive, in a sense, a time when we felt a level of passion and excitement, that, maybe due to hormones, we just don't seem to feel as strongly later in our lives. So, my question is written in part on Basil's behalf, though it came out of my thinking about this topic: Why are reunions popular and important to people? Specifically, to you?