I'm Never Going Back To My Old School

As soon as I noticed that the new year was going to be 2013, a pang of regret went right through my system.   This new year marks my 25th anniversary of my graduation from college.  Jeez, where did the time go?  I've been out of college for a quarter of a century, and I'm still unattached and living with my mother? And I'm blogging on a computer like some bored teenager?  That's what my life has pretty much come to?

And to think, in 1988, the Internet hadn't yet been made available for civilian use, and the fax machine was the the latest innovation in communications.

That mid-life crisis griping out of the way, it dawned on me that, with the silver anniversary of my college graduation approaching, I suddenly realized that this means the silver anniversary reunion is coming up.  I presume that Drew University, my alma mater, will be holding my class's silver reunion this coming June.  You may be wondering  by now if I plan to attend the reunion.

If you're a fellow member of the Drew class of 1988, which means you've likely come to this post through Facebook, don't be offended - really, don't be - but I probably won't.  In fact, you can count on my absence. It's nothing personal . . . I've just decided that college reunions are, quite frankly, not for me.

I attended only one of my college reunions - my first, for my class's fifth anniversary.  It was one of the worst experiences of my life.   It was part of an omnibus reunion for classes celebrating anniversaries at five-year intervals. The weekend's events included a free afternoon picnic, as well as an evening party for which I had to pay in advance. So what happened? Maybe only one or two of my friends showed up, along with a few casual acquaintances and classmates whose names I knew but whom I didn't know personally.  The picnic was free to get into all right, but the food cost money, and the entertainment at the picnic was mostly aimed at the children of earlier alumni - balloon sculptors and the like. Also, an a capella alumni barbershop quartet entertained the other alumni with a performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody."  I did not have a good time.  And despite paying in advance for the evening party, I had to leave early, missing it - and I couldn't get a refund.

Up to that point, I had been attending several alumni functions.  After my miserable experience in 1993, I stopped going to alumni functions for good, and for several years I didn't even bother to set foot on the Drew campus.  I tried to go back to the campus coffeehouse - my second home as a student - a couple of times after the reunion, but it just didn't feel right.

Another reason I'm not going is that we who attended college tend to have fuzzy memories - warm and fuzzy memories - about all these good times we supposedly had. We remember parties, bar-hopping, pinball machine contests, Steely Dan marathons on the campus radio station, the pantie raids on the dorm rooms of the cute drama majors involving a drainpipe escape and a few pilfered negligees that ended up flying above Old Glory on the campus flagpole - none of which ever actually happened. We forget the way college really went - the all-nighters, the failing grades, the interminable term paper research, the even more interminable process of writing the damn term papers . . . you know, the nasty stuff.  I have even more bad memories of that time too personal for me to write about here.  To be blunt, college reunions are about looking back at a dubious time in one's life through a rose-colored mist, when life should be about looking ahead clearly.

But the biggest reason I'm not going is that I haven't been in touch with most of my fellow classmates for almost as long as I've been out of college.  Most of the Facebook friends I have who went to Drew at the same time as I did, in fact, are from other classes.  Karen Hunter is from the class of 1987.  And I know her better now than I did when we were going to Drew concurrently, despite the fact that our personal connection is strictly online.  In fact, as I must have noted on this blog already, I didn't know her at all when we were both going to Drew together.  As for my fellow eighty-eighters,  I don't really know them anymore.  Some of them I never knew, but thought I did.  Whom did I know, indeed? What did I know?

Besides, school reunions of any sort are so phony, what with everyone acting more happy and content than they actually are.  Most reunion conversations are all about whoever is doing the talking, and I spend a lot of time in conversations mostly listening.  And when I talk about myself, which I don't like doing very much, I don't have much to say.  

So, again, no, I won't be going to the Drew class of 1988 silver anniversary reunion.  I don't really want to remember the late eighties.  Especially when I like my life better today than I liked it then.  

I Googled the names of some of my classmates.  One's a doctor of anti-aging and cosmetic medicine in the Philadelphia area.  Another is a media representative for the Humane Society.  Another classmate of mine is a photographer.  As for the rest, some are probably mathematicians, some are probably carpenters' wives . . ..  All the people I used to know are an illusion to me now.