What a high school reunion taught me about time, memory, and the people we used to know.
Perspective is interesting.
Have you ever seen those movie scenes where the main character is standing still and everything else is speedily moving around them? Or similarly, when everything else is standing still and the main character is zooming around everyone else?
I thought about that device recently as I attended a casual 45th high school reunion.
In looking around the room, I found myself generally making one of two observations about the people I saw.
First, that this person seems essentially unchanged—other than the obvious influences of time on their physical selves. The same friend or acquaintance I knew four or five decades ago. Same personality, cracking the same jokes, inhabiting the same persona, acting the same way.
Second, this person appears to have undergone a metamorphosis of sorts. Either for better or worse, this friend or acquaintance has become a better version of themselves. Or a different version. Or a stranger version. Or a more magnified version.
Some folks resist the ravages of time better than others, and some wear their ravages like a badge of honor.
Unpacking all of these thoughts and impressions has been interesting to me.
These people were my friends decades ago, and now, mostly, are not. They are people I used to know.
Do I still know them, though?
I would say no.
We might think we know others simply because of a longstanding history. I remember who you dated. I remember what you were like in English class. I remember the parties and the inside jokes and the people you hung out with. I remember you.
Except I don’t, really.
What I remember is the version of you I knew then. I’ve apparently been carrying that person around in my head for 45 years, frozen in time, while the actual you kept right on living.
And that is poignant.
Because whether someone appeared to have changed dramatically or remained overtly the same, I don’t actually know who that person is today. I know who they were. I got a few hours Sunday night to glimpse who they became.
And, of course, they were doing exactly the same thing to me.
That’s the part I hadn’t really considered.
As I looked across the room thinking, Wow, he hasn’t changed a bit, or She is completely different from the person I remember, someone else was undoubtedly looking at me and making the same calculation.
To some of them, perhaps I’m exactly the same person they remember from 1981. To others, maybe I’m barely recognizable beyond the obvious physical similarities.
And neither impression could possibly account for the 45 years in between.
Taking away the trappings of financial success, education, family life, travels and current station, we all started from roughly the same point more than 50 years ago. We sat in the same classrooms. Walked the same hallways. Knew the same teachers. Worried about many of the same ridiculous teenage things.
And then we scattered.
There was no way, sitting in those classrooms, to know where any of us were headed. Who would succeed beyond their wildest expectations and who would struggle. Who would marry, divorce, have children or grandchildren. Who would travel the world and who would stay close to home. Who would reinvent themselves repeatedly and who would remain remarkably recognizable as the teenager sitting three desks away.
All of those lives, beginning at roughly the same place, went off in completely different directions.
And then, for a few hours on a Sunday evening 45 years later, they converged again.
Maybe that’s why the movie image came to mind.
For a moment, it felt as though time had stopped. I could look at someone and simultaneously see the teenager I remembered and the person standing in front of me today—with 45 years of life somehow speeding invisibly between the two.
It was certainly wonderful to see so many former friends, catch up with their lives and reminisce about times past.
But more importantly for me, it gave me food for thought.
I went to a high school reunion expecting to see people I used to know.
Instead, I found myself looking around at all these familiar strangers—and wondering about them, about myself, and about all those years that passed while none of us was paying attention.
Well… how did we get here?
