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Nostalgia trumps skepticism when reunion comes around
(by Kara Krekeler - July 07, 2010)
What have I gotten myself into?
I’ve been asking myself that a lot recently. In a few weeks, I’ll be heading up to Montana for my 10th high school reunion, and despite the fact that I live half a country away, I foolishly volunteered to help track down “lost” classmates. I figured I’d do a bit of googling for the ones that aren’t on Facebook and bam! I’d be done. All that would be left would be showing up at the reunion and talking to people I haven’t seen in a decade.
No such luck. It turns out that by volunteering a bit of my spare time, I’m now one of three organizers of the event. This isn’t at all what I expected.
Let’s jump into the time machine for a minute. I graduated in a class of just over 100 students at Hamilton High School, the only high school (public or private) in Hamilton, Mont., a town of about 3,700 people, or about 5,000 once you count the houses outside of city limits. Nestled in a valley in southwestern Montana, Hamilton’s one of those towns where everybody knows everybody else and the major activities for teenagers involve skiing, going to the lake, driving an hour to go to the nearest mall or hanging out in the McDonald’s parking lot.
There’s not a whole lot going on in Hamilton, and I think most of the residents are pretty much OK with that.
For most Hamilton High classes, graduates would generally choose from three post-high school paths: they’d join the military; they’d attend college in Montana (or, if they were feeling really adventurous, Washington or Oregon); or they’d stick around town, getting a job in Hamilton or one of the other small towns in western Montana. Every class had a few people who chose to cast a wider net and go to school in California or on the East Coast, but most grads didn’t.
Except for my class. The Hamilton High class of 2000 scattered. Kids went to college in Memphis, New York City, London, even Jerusalem. As always, a few stuck around Montana, but from my recent online searches, we also live everywhere from Anchorage, Alaska, to Largo, Fla.; from Myrtle Beach, S.C., to Maui.
We were always a bit scattered, even in high school. We didn’t fit into the usual high school stereotypes — the jocks were also in band, the choir had stoners singing beside honors students. But just because we were all involved in the same activities doesn’t mean that we were cohesive. Quite the opposite in fact: my classmates were so detached from one another that we couldn’t even get together long enough to organize Senior Skip Day.
So perhaps you can understand my reservations about even attending the event in the first place — flying to Montana isn’t cheap and while I was friendly with a lot of kids in my class, most of my closest friends were either in a different grade or attended a different school. I was a bit skeptical of a reunion organized by the same group that couldn’t even agree on which day to skip school.
But nostalgia got the best of me. It’s been five years since I’ve been in Hamilton, five years since I’ve seen one of my best friends, who happens to still live in the tiny town. And when I found out that a close friend from my senior year who was an exchange student from Estonia was considering making the trek, it pretty much sealed the deal: if my friend was even thinking about flying across the Atlantic for the reunion, what excuse did I have? I had to go.
So here I am, just a couple weeks out from boarding that plane, suddenly finding myself in the middle of a haphazard attempt to cobble some sort of reunion together with two people I never really hung out with in high school.
I have no idea how this will turn out, but I’m trying to be optimistic about it. If nothing else, I’ll get to enjoy a weekend in the mountains with my husband. And that, now that I think about it, may alone be worth the trip.
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