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This past June brought about one of the most horrific events of my life: my 10 year high school reunion. I don't mean "horrific" as in it it was tortuous to see people or that the party was not well-done, I just mean that it's rough realizing that you've been out of high school for 10 years. I've been out of high school for two years longer than all of my time in high school and college combined! If someone had a baby my senior year of high school, that kid could no longer show how old he or she is on two hands!
So anyway, I of course knew this life event was coming for quite some time. I went through the usual thoughts of whether or not I even wanted to go. It was fairly expensive for Tammy and me to go, but it's not like I could really use that as a legitimate excuse. My biggest question was "I didn't particularly care about seeing the vast majority of these people ten years ago...why would I care now?". After all, I could pretty much count on a hand or two the people I could see even talking to. Most of my close friends in high school were from church, not school, so there wasn't a huge motivation. Still, though, there were definitely some people I wouldn't mind seeing, and we had two other couples to go with. And beyond all of that that, there's my simple curiosity of wondering what people looked like now and who would show up and that sort of thing. I spent a few minutes that Friday night thumbing through the senior pictures of my 1996 yearbook, trying to remember people's names. I did not do so well. Tammy noted that I seemed to recall all of the good-looking girls' names much better than the guys. I have no comment.
The festivities kicked off that Saturday at lunchtime at Homewood Park. The turnout was pretty good, but predictably not nearly as large as the turnout for the main party that night. I caught up with a few people, although most of them were among the people that I actually had seen since high school. There were kids everywhere, and it was weird to see that, contrary to my previous belief, there actually were a lot of couples within my graduating class that ended up getting married.
The night's shindig was at the Birmingham Museum of Art. The room was a good size for our group, but offered absolutely nothing to soak up sound. When we first got there and were among only a handful of people there, it was already relatively loud and hard to hear each other. This was not helped when more people came, and it became absolutely ridiculous once the band started playing. I think the most enjoyable part of the night was when the band took a break. The food was pretty good, although I ate surprisingly little. I'm usually a sucker for "free" food, but I wasn't all that hungry.
At any rate, I was blown away at the number of people who showed. I never did hear any kind of count, but I had a hard time coming up with very many people who weren't there. All the different high school groups were represented (except the one where I'm pretty sure they're all in jail), and it was interesting to see everyone after ten years. Most had changed much less than I had expected them to. You could definitely tell who was still single.
There were a number of pleasant surprises of people I was able to catch up with. One, who was one of my best friends in middle school (we were still friends in high school, but didn't hang out outside of school much) somehow managed to steal what was my life plan at one point. After graduating from Harvard (okay, so clearly that part was never in my life aspirations), he went on to work for Microsoft and now Google as a software engineer or whatever fancy titles they use nowadays. He's getting to live in Seattle and use cutting-edge technology to develop software used by millions of people, while I maintain decades-old COBOL programs on a green screen with a few dozen users or deal with users who don't want to use a system that I don't want to implement. But that's okay, I'm not bitter. :)
It was interesting to learn what various people were doing now. Some, like the aforementioned programmer and another guy who's now a programmer, were obvious guesses. Others, who are now things like pharmacists or salespeople or stay-at-home moms, are not jobs I would have picked for them 10 years ago.
So now I guess we'll have another 10 years to see how people have changed at the 20 year reunion.