Freshman year. So young. Such big glasses.
Senior. Love the enthusiasm.
Since I'm in-laws with the class president, I had a heads-up about everything. Admittedly, I was worse than no help, but my brother-in-law pulled everything together with the help of a couple more local classmates and my long-suffering sister-in-law.
It's always weird going back to your old stomping grounds. Especially when you graduated in a small town, it's disconcerting how familiar everything still is even amid all the changes. Reunions are even weirder--a bunch of people getting together who mostly have nothing in common except they all went through puberty in proximity to each other. Oh, a couple people stayed in touch with each other, but for the most part we all split up and have been doing our own thing for the last two decades. And yet, when you're back in the same place with the same people, memories you have successfully suppressed rush back uninvited. Rocking out with the band during home games, reapplying roll-on glitter before the dance, all the girls smelling like Cucumber Melon and the guys in a perpetual cloud of Axe. And it's actually kind of nice.
Reunions are always scheduled the same weekend as Pioneer Days, which, with the 4th of July and the Sweet Corn Festival, are one of the pivotal holidays of the year in Snowflake Arizona. Lots of people come back to visit anyway, and it has the added incentive of getting to ride on a class float in the parade.
Now, my class was infamous for our lack of spirit. I distinctly remember my class getting chewed out by a teacher in 8th grade because we weren't enthusiastic enough at a pep assembly. The class behind us beat us at nearly everything for years and were apoplectic when we still won the spirit contest pizza party at the end of our senior year. Part of our lack of enthusiasm was that we were numerically and physically the smallest class in several generations. The other part is that we just didn't care.
Despite this heritage of low expectations and even lower commitment, one of my class members volunteered to spearhead the float. I showed up bright and early Saturday morning for the parade, not expecting much but pleasantly surprised when Katie rode in on a decorated truck and trailer driven by another one of our classmates and his little girl. Katie, with appropriate expectations of our apathetic class, brought cornhole to play during the parade if nobody else showed up.
It turned out better than she hoped. We had about a dozen people show up for the float, with a couple more that jumped on partway through the parade and several more who sat in the crowd and were roundly booed by the rest of us when we spotted them. A couple of guys did strike up a game of cornhole during the parade. Shockingly we lost neither player nor beanbag, and we were only heckled once by another class reunion group.
My mom, who had taken the girls for the morning, met up with me at the Pioneer Days craft fair. It was underwhelming, and all the food trucks had lines too long for my stomach to bear. After an hour of forced fun and some adequate tacos at Aliberto's, we parted ways again--my mom and kids back up to the shady pines in Showlow, and me to help set up the gym.
My brother-in-law had been hoping for the high school gym, but that was snaked out from under us and we were relegated to the intermediate school. It smelled just as I had remembered, some unholy blend of rubber, mildew, and asbestos. The caterer had ghosted us, so I helped my angel sister-in-law shred pork for 80 people and cart it over to the gym. Several classmates trickled in and together we set up tables and decorated (a little bit, anyway). By 4 we were handing out class shirts and starting reintroductions.
The next four hours were awkward fun as we talked about our kids and tried to tactfully identify each other after twenty years of weight gain and hair loss. We reminisced about cringey moments and favorite teachers over excellent pork sandwiches and listened to a SFW collection of nostalgic 90s hits. We met new spouses and new babies. One classmate, currently a dentist in Texas, turned out to be a hugger. Another classmate is teaching in the very same school her mom did. There was one indelicate moment when I was asked about an old friend and had to admit we hadn't spoken in years since our breakup, but that was it. No drama, no decades-old mysteries resolved, no passive-aggressive one-upmanship... I didn't once confess undying love to an old crush or claim to have invented Post-Its. Frankly, Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion lied to us all. I'm still calling it a win, even if I did get called out as the baby of the class and had to help cut the cake.
While I'm mildly disappointed there wasn't a choreographed dance routine, it was still well worth the drive. And even though I probably won't talk to most of my classmates for another 10 years (or 5, if Erik gets nostalgic), it's kind of nice to know they're there.
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