20th High School Reunion

Update: at 2.30 am after the reunion.  It exceeded my expectations exponentially.  More tomorrow.

I’m in Suffern, New York, half an hour before my twentieth high school reunion.  I’m showered, dressed, primped, if I may, and have decided to use my free half hour not for a cocktail, or to catch up on my NaNoWriMo word count, but to think about the greatest high school movie of all time, Heathers.

My high school was not like this, as far as I know.  At least, I probably would have known Christian Slater’s character, although I never had the desire to kill any of my classmates.

Or maybe my reunion will be like this.  Something Wild’s opening credits do look exactly like my drive to Rockland County from Brooklyn today.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a clip with the whole bring-someone-you-never-met-to-your-high-school-reunion scene.

But most likely, I will talk to people with whom I may or may not have had a lot in common with twenty years ago, tell them about my life, and hear about theirs.  I got an email today from a high school friend with whom I’d lost touch, but with whom I have recently reconnected on Facebook.  She said she wasn’t coming, and that I was the only person she really wanted to see.  I am flattered by that, but also feel I’m a different person than I was in high school.  (As was everybody: everybody in high school was in high school, right?)  I now look back at whatever complicated or confused feelings I felt when I left high school as remnants of adolescence and childhood: leaving my hometown, opening into new horizons, meeting new people, making my way into the wide, wide world.  Conversely, I see tonight as a unique opportunity to visit where I once was and maybe even have an experience or a conversation that twenty years ago, I thought I would have to leave Suffern to find.

Oh, look.  It’s time to go.