By Don Nelson
I don’t know if anyone does class reunions any more. The pandemic has made public gatherings a risky proposition. Getting to a reunion site would involve complicated travel arrangements for most people, along with the challenge of finding lodging and meals wherever the event is staged. Zoom just doesn’t seem like a workable platform for getting a bunch of people together to reminisce and, let’s face it, drink perhaps a bit more than usual — although the chat room commentary might be interesting.
Some people just don’t see much point in communing with a bunch of folks with whom they share little in common other than matriculation from the same alma mater — except maybe out of natural human curiosity to see how everyone turned out. Inevitably, there will be assessments, comparisons, measurements of achievement based on unfair or unkind perspectives. It’s not kind to judge.
I think that in rural communities, reunions may be more meaningful. People are closer to each other, for better or worse. They have more shared experiences than students at large urban schools. School reunions in the Methow Valley seem to be convivial affairs. For many years, my mother attended reunions with her fellow graduates of a Catholic high school in a small Nebraska farm town. It was an important connection for her to revisit the place where she grew up. At age 93, she is likely one of the last remaining grads.
The last reunion I attended was in 2012, the 45th anniversary of the Kent-Meridian High School class of 1967. I enjoyed it. It was still easy to recognize people who were then in their mid-60s, and pleasant to reconnect with them. I was the only one in the room who owned a newspaper. Some fellow grads remembered that I worked on the high school newspaper and were not surprised. The passage of time was evident in many ways. At that point, many of our 400-plus classmates had passed away, some many decades before.
Why the reunion question came up is that recently I was reminded that this year is the 50th anniversary of the Seattle University Class of 1971. Which was a “wow” moment. I’m not sure I’ve gotten my head around “50” yet. I haven’t checked the S.U. website for information about any planned activities, and I suspect that anything the alumni planners have in mind will be still need to be COVID-compliant. There are some fellow grads that I would love to see … if I thought they would be there, and we could have a meaningful interaction.
Even at a small private school, I didn’t get to know everyone in my class. Some of us were “dormies,” some of us “townies,” all of us were in our own disciplinary silos. The engineering students didn’t mix it up with the journalism students all that much. But I have followed the lives, careers and achievements of classmates with interest through the alumni magazine. It was an interesting group of people, and they made their marks in the world.
You can’t avoid thinking of college reunions as landmarks. At 10 years, you’re still feeling young and enthused about your potential. At 20 years, you’ve probably got a family and have established a clear career path. Thirty years out, you’re in middle age and thinking about getting your own kids through college. At 40 years, retirement is likely on the near horizon. If we have matured at all, we’re way past keeping up appearances to impress others.
My 50 years past the college gown-and-tassel ceremony have taken me all over the country for jobs in journalism, which has always been a somewhat itinerant profession.
It all seems to have transpired rather quickly. The passage of half-a-century can be cause for retrospection and introspection, if you’re into that sort of thing. I am, to a certain extent, but not in regretful way. Like everyone else, I made choices that I thought were the best at the time, and so here I am now. I believe this is where I was meant to be — which is not to say it has always been easy.
Some of my energetic Kent-Meridian classmates are planning a 55th reunion event in 2022. I’ll go if I can. After all, how many more chances will there be?
