I'm STILL Not Going Back To My Old School

I had skipped all of my college class reunions at Drew University, since I went to the first one - my fifth-anniversary reunion, which turned out to be a personal disaster - but when my college class's thirtieth-anniversary reunion, which occurred this past weekend, came up, this time I thought of going.  I realized that thirty years are a long time, and whatever hangups I had about reunions, I thought it would still be nice to see my old friends at my old school.  

Except for one thing - none of my old friends showed up.

Fortunately, I didn't have to go to my thirtieth-anniversary reunion to find that out.  First of all, I had already learned from a few of my friends first-hand that they would not be attending.  Then, I managed to contact a classmate who was helping to organize the reunion, and she sent me a list of classmates who were registered for the event.  The number of people whom I knew that were on the list were few, and those few were mostly people I never wanted to see again.   

I think there were only one or two people I knew - a quad-mate of mine (a quad is four separate dorm rooms with a common bathroom) and his now-wife, neither of whom I was particularly buddy-buddy with - to make it worth my while.

So, I didn't go.  I knew of some of the people who attended, even though I didn't know them personally.  One classmate, who was regarded as the class's most beautiful blonde girl, was there, as was her friend, who was the class's most beautiful brunette.  I saw pictures of them at the reunion, which were posted on my class's Facebook page; I almost didn't recognize them.  And the guys?  I'd seen them around on campus back in the eighties, and I even crossed paths with them, and I was shocked at how old many of them looked!

But then, we're all in our fifties now.  Maybe the thought of seeing my classmates aged thirty years subconsciously kept me from going.

But it was the thought of seeing someone I never wanted to see again that was the clincher.  One of my biggest regrets from college was my infatuation with the female drama students on campus; women in the performing arts have always been a weakness of mine.  I somehow managed to have crushes at different times on three of the drama students in my college class.  I won't call them by their names, but I will refer to them by their Cyrillic initials:  ЛP, ЛC, and MБ.  All three associations left me hurt and upset, but my association with MБ was especially painful, because I thought I loved her . . .and it turned out that she didn't even consider me a friend.

Anyway, one of them was on the list of classmates registered for the reunion.  Which one?  It doesn't matter.

And, as you can guess by now, I never did have a college sweetheart.

It's probably too late to go to another reunion, the next one being in 2023; it's already been too long.  But you know what?  I started thinking about the friends I had in other classes, and I realized that, because classes reunite on the Drew campus at five-year intervals, and because there's never a class more than three years ahead of or behind you during your time at school, there is no way your class reunion can coincide with the reunions of any of the classes your class shared time with on campus.  In other words, you see your friends from your own class at the reunions of multiple classes but no one you know from any other class.  I probably had more friends in the Class of 1989 than in the Class of 1988.  So why would I want to party with so many people I didn't actually know?

Ahh, who cares?  I had a low profile at school, taking part in few extracurricular activities and no varsity sports (and I've since become opposed to intercollegiate varsity athletics anyway), and  I didn't go to a lot parties because I don't drink.  All I got out of college was an education.  Higher education, in its purest form, leads to an alienating life of contemplation; I was never good at the social side of things, which means that I have never had to deal with alumni association policies - like the organizers of my class's reunion. 

But I don't let falling by the wayside and not being a part of the "in crowd" bother me.  As a Martin O'Malley supporter, I'm actually used to it.

Oh, yeah, my class's silver anniversary reunion in 2013 . . ..  If I had gone to that reunion that June, as I was musing about back in January 2013, I would have had a lousy time.  That reunion was actually held in October 2013. :-D