Damn. I’m about to go to my 21st High School Reunion and I’m not rich, I’m not famous, and I haven’t been elected to anything.1
Going to a high school reunion is a bit of a scary endeavor. You will see people you haven’t spoken with in years, and you’re faced with telling them what you’ve done with your life; revealing who you’ve become. It’s judgement day.
What exactly should I say about myself? Do I tell them that I like to memorize things? No, that would be weird. Do I tell them that I have a Master’s degree in three dimensional computer animation? No, that would be bragging. Do I say that I’m chief surgeon at a major metropolitan hospital? No, that would be lying.
For the most part, all we know about each other is what we were. But frankly, I’m a very different person now than I was 21 years ago. Back in the late ‘70s I was a skinny little nerd with glasses. (Now I’m a bald, skinny little nerd with glasses.) Now I have all these life experiences that I didn’t have back then — in fact more than half of my life has passed since we were together in High School.
Of course there are other fears. What if I don’t recognize my classmates? That would be embarrassing. What if nobody recognizes me? That would be devastating — though it shouldn’t be altogether unexpected — I wasn’t the most memorable classmate. (Probably my most notable feat was breaking my arm at Disney World on our Senior Trip.)
The truth is that none of this really matters. The reunion will be an opportunity to share some time with people who were part of the most formative years of my life. (I’ve had jobs that have lasted longer than I was in high school, but were not 1/100th assignificant.)
No, I don’t have a huge number of accomplishments to show off, but I’m happy. I have a great family, I have a good job, and I have a newspaper that’s gullible enough to publish my obscure cartoons and essays, collectively called Perspicuity. In fact, this cartoon will be in the November issue of the Editorial Humor newspaper. In my accompanying essay I will talk about our 21st high school reunion and about the Yanomami Indians, who live in jungle villages on the Venezuela / Brazil border. The Yanomami were one of the most remote tribes on the
planet. They became quite familiar and well-studied in college anthropology courses when Napoleon Chagnon wrote his book “Yanomamö — The Fierce People” in 1968 (when we were all in Second Grade). I’ll probably go off on some tangent about what anthropology is — how it is the study of the origin and the social, physical, and cultural development and behavior of humans. And in my typical circumlocutory writing style, I will find some feeble way to connect these disparate topics together at the very end.
I know this isn’t very profound, but in many ways I’m the same person I was 21 years ago and in many ways I’m different. And that’s how it is for everyone in the room at the reunion. My goal will be to meet my old friends anew and find each of their skeins of familiarity, to remember things I haven’t thought about since they happened, and reestablish some correspondences that have been misplaced over the years. It will be an evening of
anthropology.
1I wrote this for my former classmates in October 2000 for our 21st reunion. Our class forgot to have a 20th reunion.