They are strange things, class reunions. There is a certain fascination about them because, in the end, we measure our lives against our contemporaries. Those younger and older are of little interest in this game of comparisons. And so, at the 20 year get together, we find ourselves wandering around in evening dress, surreptitiously watching out of the corner of our eye for the blemishes, the feet of clay. The fellow with the paunch and the lined, careworn face does us all a service. We glance at him and whisper out of the corner of our mouths how old he looks. The initial impression is how little people have changed, until you remember that you are looking at them with eyes that are accustomed to the middleaged face in the shaving mirror.
My wife asked me if I enjoyed the reunion, but that is not quite the right term. It is one of those events, like funerals, that momentarily take you out of the comfortable monotony of the familiar. Each year there is some event that tolls the bell for another year. For me it is returning home on a frosty November night and seeing Orion for the first time in the winter black sky. For my wife, alas, it is doing the tax returns (a flicker of guilt there). But the once a decade event signals the passing of a serious fraction of your life expectancy and causes more than momentary reflection.
So how were they all, these people whose past was briefly entangled with your own? The surprising thing is the extent to which characteristics seem to stay invariant over half a lifetime. There is clearly a law of conservation of feistiness, a law of conservation of awkward English gangliness, a law of conservation of absurd high pitched laughs, and going into too much detail about your past (and possibly a correlation between the latter two variables). And the people who always described themselves in capital lettered clichés, broad brush stroke categories taken from self help books, still do. And then there are the people who, whatever they say, have let you glimpse the uniqueness of them, and you are glad to have met them again.
And overall you drive away in reflective mood, having taken time out of the normal flow of life to consider yourself. Any regrets? As Woody Allen said, “My only regret, is that I'm not someone else.”