Reunion Realities: Why I'll Be There, but Not Expecting Much

Thoughts on 25 Years of Being a Reunion Coordinator

You may have noticed I’m late with the post this week. I don’t have an excuse, really. I think procrastination like this happens to me when I’m facing something I’m not expecting to go well. In this case, it’s my 25-year college reunion. When I graduated from college, I was excited about being an alum and took on letter-writing and reunion-planning with gusto. This was good, because no one else wanted to.

I went to a small, Christian college just south of Boston. These days Eastern Nazarene College (ENC) has been in the news a bit. They’re housing migrants in need of shelter. This past Saturday a neo-Nazi group arrived to voice their protest. I’m proud that my alma mater is providing living arrangements for people who had to flee their home. It’s one of the things that instills hope for the institution’s future.

I mean, if you’re doing something that motivates the alt-right to speak up, I kind of feel like that thing you’re doing is probably on the path towards justice. I believe ENC is doing the right thing.

I haven’t always felt this way. For sure, over the years my feelings about the place I went to college have fluctuated. I’m still mostly a positive voice for the school. In a way it’s been my home since before I was born. I hope for good for the school. I also want it to be good, to do good for our world with any growth coming as a result of the meaning it brings to the world. My understanding of what goodness looks like has changed over the years, and my opinion as to how this might play out at my alma mater has faded into the myriad of voices about what they should endeavor to be. As I said, their current effort to be a place of refuge for those seeking safety fits into my understanding of the world and what a church should be for those in need.

You may be asking, “What does any of this have to do with your 25-year reunion?”

Well, nothing really. Except that everyone has an opinion about how we should handle undocumented migrants. Similarly, it seems everyone who attended ENC has a strong opinion about the institution as well, and their efforts these days will continue to inform those opinions one way or the other. Any time I bring up ENC I get to hear those opinions. Anyways, it seemed worth mentioning even if it is off-topic a bit.

When it comes to being the de-facto class correspondent, the unbridled enthusiasm I once had has dissipated. I simply burned out. The problem is when it comes to our reunions, the planning still falls to me. So here I am, staring at a reunion in less than three weeks and the fear I’ll be there all by myself is real.

It may happen. I wasn’t at the last reunion (20 years), unable to make the trip. As I recall, there were about 5 or 6 people at our 15-year reunion, and I was one of them.

I think it’s fair to say we weren’t a particularly tight class to begin with, with certain bands of students keeping to their own lanes. It’s not universally true, but I don’t think there’s anyone who would accuse me of being unfair to the lived reality. That’s not to say there was animosity between these groups, we just didn’t do much together as a whole. Personally, I dipped my toes into these different social ponds in a few ways.

For a couple years, I tried to be an athlete and managed to make the baseball team. I think they mostly put up with me because I was a nice guy, worked hard during the season and chased more out-of-play foul balls than anyone else. I learned there were tiered subgroups within athletics. There were the multiple-sport athletes, then there were the regular players, then there were the subs, then there were the rest of us. After a couple traumatic injuries, one of which resulted in a surgical reconstruction of my schnozz, I decided maybe I should use my energy elsewhere.

I was also part of the A Capella choir for a couple of years. It was a great group of people who would have embraced me fully had I let them. It’s where I met my wife. But I was playing baseball, so A Capella was kind of a thing I did on the side. It wasn’t really something you could do well “on the side,” so I dropped A Capella too. I regret this far more than quitting baseball.

I was a part of our class council representing the class of 1998 to the Student Government Association. This also took a lot of time and effort. While I served alongside students from other areas of interest in the school, we were sometimes frustrated by the lack of attendance at our events. We’d beg people to go to them, mostly with little effect. Students were busy with their own extra-curricular groups’ events (baseball, a capella, chemistry club, etc…) and there was a good amount of burnout. Class events just weren’t a priority for most.

It was for this reason our council decided not to plan the annual senior event in the traditional way. It was usually a spring camping trip; maybe a canoe trip or something…I don’t actually recall because we didn’t do it. We knew attendance would be sparse and didn’t think the planning efforts required for a weekend trip for a dozen or so attendees would be worth it. Instead we planned a progressive dinner hosted by some faculty members.

I still wouldn’t call it a large turnout. There might have been 30 or so of us in attendance, a bit better than the events we’d had during our sophomore and junior years after the novelty of being college freshmen had dissolved. It was a more diverse group, with a smattering of students from various campus groups. Those of us gathered that evening sat around, talked with each other, ate food and then got into cars and moved on to the next host location.

It was a low-stress event, conducive for intimacy we hadn’t experienced as a class before. We found we had more in common than any of us realized. We discovered some of the athletes weren’t quite as cocky as maybe we had thought they were. We learned some of the music and communication arts majors would have loved to have played a varsity sport but couldn’t due to the demands of their majors. We recognized that the student leaders were quite tired, and wished they’d had more time to be with the students they were serving. We all appreciated the struggles we’d each had, and realized that while our college experiences had been different there were a lot of similarities too.

Nothing profound happened at that event and nobody made any deep connections. I wouldn’t say it was a particularly memorable activity and I don’t think I could name 8 people who were there out of the group of 30 or so.

I remember conflicting feelings that evening. A feeling of sadness; a sense of resignation, perhaps. What we experienced on that evening at our last class activity made me consider how we’d missed an opportunity as a class. We never figured out how to be a closer group. I felt bad for having made assumptions about others I didn’t know well. I learned those assumptions may have prevented more meaningful relationships, even if they’d been relationships on the fringes of my college experience.

Looking back at the 22-year-old kid that walked across the platform in 1998 … geez… there’s not much left of him. I mean it was me, but I’m not that guy anymore. He certainly wouldn’t recognize the person I am now. 

Most of my interaction with college friends over the years has waned. I’ll drop a line to some of them from time to time, and sometimes they’ll contact me first. We’ll make some on-line small talk, and that’ll be it for a while. As I think about it, there are really only three people I’m in regular contact with. I’ll exchange memes relating to the TV hit, The Office, with my wife’s college roommate and her husband. The four of us keep in close contact. We’ve even managed to get together a few times over the decades since graduating and I’m grateful for them. 

I still consider my college roommate a best friend. He’s the kind of friend we all swear we’re going to be on the day of graduation. He’s a life companion and we’ve never grown less relevant to each other due to the passage of time or number of miles between us. In the years since college I’ve grown to appreciate him more than I did back in the day, and wish I’d been more like him. He knew how to be fully authentic. I like to think I’m closer to being like that today, but I really could have benefited from having that outlook in college. I think this would have helped me realize it was ok that I wasn't an athlete and to focus on other areas where I’d have found greater amounts of love and acceptance.

For sure, he’s been the one constant friend in my life; the kind of friend everyone needs. The one who will pick up the phone when I need him to and listen to the various ramblings of my bullshit. He’s been a source of accountability but never judgment. And he’s stuck around when my faux cockiness was a bit bloated or when I pontificated about all that was wrong with our church family.

Not that I’d ever do something like that.

At any rate, as my worldview began to change and I’d share my perspective on Facebook something unexpected happened. Every once in a while I’d get a surprising message from one of my classmates. I don’t think anyone would be offended when I describe them as people who weren’t “friends,” so to speak. We had been friendly to each other, we just walked in different circles and our interactions were surface-level. But as I began to share my newfound ideals - a blog post here, a Facebook status post there, maybe even the random tweet - I’d hear from them. They’d offer a comment indicating I was a different person than they remembered. I had one person tell me they liked me more now than they did then. Another told me how proud they were of me. Come to think of it, I suppose I could have taken their comments with a sense of condescension. But I knew that wasn’t what they were trying to do. 

I always receive those messages with love. To a certain extent I get the same feelings I had as I looked around at the group of people gathered at the progressive dinner 25 years ago. With a sort of nostalgic resignation. I just wish we’d been more relatable to each other when we were together too.

The truth is, I’m not sure my Christian college fostered an environment of authenticity. Ultimately, however, this frustration is pointed towards my greater faith community. Eastern Nazarene College was an intentional extension of that community. (It has taken a lot of effort for me to avoid a tangent on the issue of inauthenticity in Christianity, but I’ve decided to file this away for another time.)

As I look back and try to remember the people who stifled my inner being, those who demanded I act a certain way, I can’t remember any of them. It’s not that I don’t remember the people… I do. I just don’t remember any of those individuals to be people who blanched on the rare occasion when I opened up and shared my struggles and failures. I never found anything but love and support. For all the griping I might do, I had a nice college experience and enjoy looking back on it.

If you were a member of my college class, you’ll likely remember the letters I used to write on behalf of the college in anticipation of our reunions. They’d start with something like, “Can you believe it’s been FIVE YEARS (then 10, 15…) since we graduated?” Then go on to include a passive-aggressive suggestion that people donate to our class scholarship. I wrote those letters with gusto. I enjoyed it.

I was naïve. In my mind I conjured up this idea that everyone would want to reminisce with me. That in the months and years that passed since graduation everyone had somehow developed a desire to gather on campus again, and that they’d be able to dig deep into their pockets to give to a class scholarship fund while simultaneously trying to put a dent into their own college loan responsibilities.

I eventually burned out. By our 20th year reunion I’d need to ask someone else to take the helm. They did. But here we are again.

I’m still involved with the school, to a certain extent. My wife and I are fortunate to be able to respond positively to the school’s fund-raising efforts. This year we were able to be a small part of helping to fund some campus renovations. It’s the same auditorium where so many student body activities have taken place over the decades. I’ll be in attendance as they dedicate the ol’ Student Center Auditorium to a long-loved English professor who passed away a few years ago. Had I been an English major back then, I probably would have had her. But in those days I was simply a “get a college degree and wife” major. 

Missions accomplished.

Still, we’ll be dedicating the Ruth Cameron Auditorium on Saturday evening. I imagine her husband will be in attendance. The fact that he’s still among us today is living testimony to the idea that walking quickly from place to place just might be good for our longevity.

As for the reunion, I’ll be there too. 10AM in the Nease library. It might just be me and my great-grandpa Nease’s picture on the wall. I hope not. That would be awkward given our differences in theology these days. I’m hoping to see some of the people who considered me a friend back then, but I’m also hoping to see some of those people I wish I’d known better. The people I probably could have treated better. Somehow I feel like the new relationships might take on more meaning now that we’ve all experienced a lot of what life has to offer. Maybe we’ll talk about how life has hit us in the face. Some are divorced now. My wife and I came closer to divorce than many know. Some have lost spouses or children to death. But some of us have also experienced successes or found ourselves in places we never considered. Some of us are grandparents now!

Anyways … 

Can you believe it’s been 25 years?!? ……….